Excerpt: Educating Sophia

Crawl before Walking: The Blog

Tomorrow, things come to an end.

Don’t they always though?

I’m sitting here in my empty home save for a dining room set I’m leaving for the new owners, and for the first time since I’ve decided to leave it all, there is a tug in my chest, a yearning to have my home fully furnished again.

A yearning to drive thirty minutes down the road and pull into my parents’ driveway on any afternoon to find my mother in the kitchen, making something like meatloaf, mashed potatoes and gravy, and fresh greens and carrots.

But we all yearn, and sometimes, our yearnings, our wants are for naught.

Sometimes, the rose-colored glasses of our lives get smashed right on our faces, cutting into our eyes, distorting the world before us.

Or perhaps, showing us exactly how cruel and bloody that world is.

Right now, I’m trying not to cry. I’ve cried so much over the last few weeks, months, years. You all know this. I’ve cried to keep from screaming every drop of air from me.

Feels weird to be this old, yet feel so young. I feel vulnerable. Unsteady. Unsure. Like that first time on the bike when Mama pushed me and said, “Ride, girl, ride,” and I did, pedaling three rotations before crashing to the ground and scuffing my palms. At least then, Mama got me right back up, tending to my cuts, and told me, “I’m so proud of you, Sophia. You’re such a big girl. Wanna try again?”

And because she believed in me, because her eyes told me she would never leave my side, never hurt me, I wiped the tears from my eyes, nodded, and said with a shaky voice, “OK, let’s.”

Now, no amount of tending to can ease this emotional fungus inside of me.

I have crashed to the ground from the bike of life, and there is no one there to tell me that they are proud of me, that I can get back up and do it again.

I feel like a gaping wound, one that bleeds, that’s tender to the softest of touches, that gets re-injured just as a scab begins to cover it.

And that’s bad all by itself.

But what makes it worse? I don’t care.

I don’t care that I don’t care.

I’m crying because I hurt, yes.

But I’m crying even more because that gaping wound has been there for so long, has been in contact with so much that it’s immune to itself. It doesn’t even know that it hurts anymore.

I don’t know that I hurt anymore.

I just know that Mama’s leaving is the climactic ending to Sophia Davis.

To this Sophia Davis anyway.

I wouldn’t even know how to get her back.

I’m not sure anymore I want her back.

And to keep from killing her, thus killing myself, I’m running.

I just hope at some point the running will stop.

I’ll keep you all posted. If someone had told me that seven years ago I would be sharing my life with people I didn’t even know and would grow to care about them as if they were my own flesh and blood, I would have laugh right in their face.

Absurd, I’d say.

But as I close this entry out, I just have to say that you guys will never know how much your comments have helped me through this.

Now, I think I might need you more than ever.

SD, signing out.