Disappearing Woman

"Disappearing Woman

In silence, she's been bound

She's here, but gone without a trace

Nowhere to be found"

The hot, summer sun beat through the window of my bedroom, the song of cicadas leading my small, clumsy hands in their creaking ballad of inspiration. Britney Spears smiled down at me from a poster above my white, wicker desk, her pigtails adorned with tufts of white feathers, beaming a porcelain smile that had yet to crack under the pressure of stardom.

The year was 1998. I was 6 years old. Or, if you'd asked me then: 6 and one quarter, thank you very much.

I recall the shock, followed by the stain of briny tears falling from my newly divorced mothers face when I proudly showed her what i'd been working on. Back then, I really didn't know where the words were coming from. It wasn't like now, at 31, squinting at a laptop screen through blue light glasses and huffing in frustration - they just poured out of me with no sense of reason. I loved to write, and the words would shake themselves loose from my clammy fingers onto the pages of my pink spiral notebook. (It had to be pink; after all, I was a princess, you know.)

I had all the makings of a normal, if precocious, child. I danced and cooed with glee to the rhythm of boy bands, I sifted through the warm earth of my back yard for wriggling earth worms, I sat in rapt awe of Snow White as she crooned to cartoon birds- and heaven help any adult who dared to dress me in anything but a frilly dress and lace capped socks; and yet, the words that flowed through me were of a different age, as if my pen were held hostage by the mind of a wiser being. I didn't understand what I wrote, only that it came as easily to me as breathing, and that it froze the "grown-ups" in their tracks with confusion.

I wrote of things, that now, I can comprehend all too well, but could never put to paper. Where I once wrote of pain beyond my years, I now write of fantasy, of far off worlds that could never exist- of the places I long to escape to. It seems, that in my innocence, I channeled those around me with frightening aptitude and precision, where in my adult years, I hide that suffering within me as adeptly as they did.

"Once upon a time, she'd laugh

She'd joke, and dance, and sing-

But never again since that crooked man gave her a diamond ring"