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Jasper the Akorn

You can be generally unsure of something for a very long time, and never really get over that feeling of uncertainty. It's an unpleasant and mostly unwelcome phenomena, but in some rare and strange cases that feeling becomes home, and anything else just feels wrong.

You could say I'm living with a ghost of sorts - and you may say it's my own ghost, as if my soul is elsewhere and, instead, wandering aimlessly outside of my body, haunting me, waiting. I never know. I don't think that's quite the circumstance, though. I'm pretty sure it's someone else's ghost - the ghost of a girl I found in a hospital gown, crying in a drainage ditch. The power was out. I stared at her in the middle of a thunderstorm, feeling wounded. I carried her back home with me. I was 16 then, and my parents were enjoying their joined vacation time in the tropics while I ditched school, drank a lot, and became so stoned out of my mind that I'm still not even sure most of that two-week span was real.

I remember I was in the shower the next morning and she had managed to unlock the bathroom door, undress, and join me. I wasn't that kind of kid. In my embarrassment I ran off, hid in my room for a awhile, and came out to make her macaroni and cheese. It was pretty much the only thing I knew how to make.

Within the two and a half weeks my parents were gone I grew into an unfathomable infatuation with her. Between the cycles of alcohol and E I would curl up next to her in bed as if it were something that made any kind of sense at all. I'm not even sure she existed. She had amnesia, she didn't even know her name - and I never did, either. One day she up and left. I woke up in the morning with the clothes I had bought her packed neatly in my dresser drawers and the side of my little twin bed where we had spent so much time curled up next to each other, bridled in innocence and the feeling of each others breath, was empty without her. That was about the time my parents came home.

I went back to school then. I skateboarded to and from and I didn't do anything else. I waited for her like a lost pet - I worried that while I was sitting in Chemistry she might be pawing at my window like Jasper in the middle of the night. Hell, I even made Macaroni and Cheese with the doors and windows open to try and coax her out of hiding.

We had never said one word to each other, for all I know she was a mute. I don't know what her voice sounds like, and as the years pass and pass and school years fly by without care and my little ounce-baggie drains and is replenished that uncertainty grows and grows as the image of her face and her swaying hips in the window fades. I still wonder if she exists.

And I am the rare occasion that this uncertainty feels like home. I am grabbed each morning with the familiarity of Jasper and my new bedroom, and I wonder if she's there, and I know she is. Except now I'm not sure whether everyone else is real. I stay away from all of them. I hide from the distinct measures of humanity and prefer to indulge in my anxiety by walking in the woods, hoping to, perhaps, find her sleeping in a tree.

Until then smoke carries me. Jasper follows. I don't know how it all works anymore, but I suppose it does somehow. You could say I'm on a path to a better me, or maybe I'm just pretending to be what everyone wants me to be. My family has become careless in their judgement, and where I love them, when were they ever part of my life? I don't even know who I am anymore, but they expect me to be whoever it is. Unless it's someone they don't like.

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Super Old by Me.

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