11

Everything changed

when I was 11

I moved from the deserts of the Mojave

to the forests near Yosemite

From a house to an apartment

to be with my grandma

before her passing

*

I stopped playing music

I started playing chess

I started hanging out with friends late

in a 1990 teal top-down mustang

I had my first boyfriend

who lived up the street

I started smoking cigarettes regularly

I drank whiskey once a day

concealed in a soda can to keep it my secret

*

Grandma helped me with

my algebra homework

when she had the energy

She still made me laugh with

all the silly thing she said

She still was beautiful even with

no hair and an oxygen tank

She didn't have enough breath

anymore to play harmonica with me

*

Then grandma passed

That's when my life was flipped

upside-down once again

*

The day we buried her

it was my best friend's birthday

I went to her party for a while

after the funeral

When I came home

hell's fires were burning

next to an empty bottle of Everclear

My mom was throwing my world

off the second story balcony

She forced me to leave

*

I left everything there

except a bag of things

I collected from the scattered leaves

I slept in the cemetery

up the street

*

Everyone says

I am just like my grandma

It was like now that she's gone

my mom felt the need to kill me

*

So I became a ghost

I haunted the roads

*

Eventually I found my way

back home

Way back down south

to the desert again

*

Back then I was an atheist

I wandered through

the junipers and joshua trees

feeling like if there was a god

he hated me

*

I didn't want to believe

that a talking dictator in the sky

would plan such a life for me

I preferred to understand life

through science and physics

*

But I yearned to have a connection

with something higher than myself

I wanted to believe in something

beyond numbers and logic

*

That's when I discovered

meditation and Buddhism

That's when I realized

that reincarnation

and the first law of thermodynamics

are the same thing

Spirituality suddenly started to make sense

*

Then one day

through all my wandering

I started to feel

my connection to the Earth

The fractalicious webs that connect me

to all things of this universe

*

I looked into my reflection

upon the desert ponds of spring

and recognized I am a spiritual being

*

I was 11 when everything changed

It was under the desert sun of May

when the fields were flooded

orange with poppies

*

It was when I was all alone

when I found god

It was then I realized

wherever I go

I am never alone