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2010 HONORABLE MENTION / ENTRY FEE CATEGORY

This is the Story
By Libby Walkup


A million miles from my midwest home under the December gray, English sky, I sat on a bench in a small park behind my house smoking a cigarette. As always, my iPod played some distant tune and my ear buds were in. I spent a lot of time checking-out via the nearly endless playlist on it avoiding every feeling I was feeling for the months that I had been in Bath. I'd used alcohol before. I'd used TV. I'd even used friends. Music was all I had here.

It was cold, not Fargo cold, but cold enough for sitting on a bench in fingerless mittens and multiple layers of near warmth. I was the farthest I had ever been from home. It was the longest I had ever been from home. I was feeling sorry for my lonely self, and colder than the weather were my innards. My organs. My blood. My skin hadn't felt the warmth of another body for... could have been decades, but was only years.

I inhaled a deep, sad drag of that cigarette and sunk into the bench, trying to ignore all of these things. The cold. My anger and bitterness. My loneliness and disconnection. My insecurity and self loathing. I tried hard. But being away from home for even a short period of time can make even the best trained in denial take a hard look at themselves. It can straighten you out. Make you understand things your home town would never have let you seen.

Arms crossed over my chest and staring at the grass at my feet. I ignored the landscape around me, so different from my own. I had learned to look down to avoid the endless flat terrain of the Red River Valley. It's unnerving being able to see forever. But, the hills of Bath, whether I looked up at all of their green or not, still had a way of teaching me depth perception. I hadn't realized it but things had already begun to change.

A million times I'd heard the song. A million times I'd played it at the coffee shop I used to work at in downtown Fargo. A million times I'd listened, intentionally to the song on the fifteen mile bus ride to my master's class up the hill. A million times on the twenty minute walk to the city center. But this time, on this bench, "My Red Right Ankle" by The Demberists tweaked something in my tear ducts. It shifted something in my subconscious.

"This is the story of the boys who love you/Who love you now and loved you then," and for the first time in years I remembered that there had been boys who loved me. I was lovable. All of the buildup of the lonely months away from home and the many bitter, cold months before that had finally come to this textual shift. The Decemberists had been trying to tell me for months, but my soul couldn't hear them through all the noise in my head.

On this day, far from home, in the southwest English cold, my soul opened up and all the words and feelings and thoughts that had been tangled up behind closed doors and empty, corked bottles lodged deep in my belly, broke open and came forward. This day, and these simple words wrapped in a song, was my temporary shift into my conscious self.

They saved me.

I looked up and inward. I looked all around. I began to soften. I began to heal. Now, at an independent coffee shop, back in Fargo, that moment seems a million years before now and a million miles from here. The tiny, life-changing shifts a few lines from a song, a poem or a story can cause will be held on to, deep in my soul, because they are as fleeting as I am with my suitcase, only sticking around long enough to do the laundry, searching for a place to call home.###

 

Congratulate Libby via www.libbywalkup.wordpress.com or libbywalkup@gmail.com

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