by Taylor Grace Flowers (2023)

Late, late at night, already early into the next day, that wet-blue time of night when nobody belongs anywhere, I am only ever then finding my way home. And somehow I have always made out a different path there. I never learned the city, not after a month and not now after many years; it is huge, sometimes monstrous, and still it has been my education.

One night long ago, while fast asleep, I was carried into a building at the cross streets of North and Western, but from I don’t remember where. I simply woke up in a new room in a new city and with no memory of my old life. I felt my body was accustomed to an urban environment, to a city, what with the long taut muscles in my legs and the lack of any driver’s license, but I could not name which one, which city I might have otherwise known. And I felt I had been educated, as whenever I passed any school, I longed to enter, to sit at a small desk and listen up, keep my head down, and whenever I passed any students on the street I felt in my heart like I was one of them, like I should have been walking with them, talking chemistry and basketball and girls, but I could not verify that, I didn’t even know how to ask. I’ve lost touch with those feelings since I stopped living in the daytime.

Here I have learned that I feel freest in the dark. I walk at night, I work at night, I sleep at dawn. Even in my tallest shoes and shortest skirt, on call, on the curb, available, everywhere I feel I am the one in control. No matter my injuries. I can go anywhere. I can be whoever I want, and I can be nobody too. I can disappear. And I know I can leave here, just as I came, came to. Still I do not leave. Where would I go? What would be better anywhere else?

Now I hear that maybe the night doesn’t even want me anymore. There’s a rumor going around. I hear I am getting older. It’s a bitter sound like a train coming in late to a last stop. I hear they don’t want to see me anymore. To me, I am the same, I have only ever been exactly as I am right now. But apparently this is not the case. I am changing and all the time. Now I see not a dream but a holy ghost: who comes to me at night and takes my hand, lifting me from my bed and into someplace both home and not, both real and not, and telling me how to live. I’m told to continue. I’m told to continue to take pleasure in my work. That this is a virtue. That I give pleasure too is a fact of my fruit. I’m told to continue to give. Whatever the hour.

Tonight I am still a long ways from home, though I am headed there. This home that somebody else made mine. I touch the money in my pocket, the souvenir of being wanted, and what a comfort. I have learned how good it feels just to be wanted, irrespective of the virtue or the pleasure. I have learned how good it feels just to sit on the beach, to unearth the sand, to watch the black waves rolling ever farther away from me, because I think this is how it might feel to be a mother. It’s been rumored too that I would not make a good mother. My ghost has nothing to say about that.

Tonight I close my eyes as I feel ever closer to my old life. I can almost remember it. The greater the distance that space and time forge between my today and every yesterday, all the greater I am sure that it was. Something I used to know. Something big, and beautiful, and uncontainable, irrepressible, bright. Brightness I don’t know now. Anyway: what good is freedom when there’s not a single thing you know to want? My ghost says I might name anything at all. Yet there’s nothing I can name but myself.