Family Stone

In high school, before I dropped out, I’d sit by the creek bed smoke cigarettes and grass with my friends and say; “something is missing, man; something’s not right.” But Everyone feels they’re an outcast at sixteen, sweet potential bursting unseen in the long dull mirror of mediocrity. Stoned, I’d contemplate the lay of the land: Dad awaiting the losses of autumn three siblings, strangers breezing in and out, one sister younger, thunder, lightening the charge in our mother’s storms. How to navigate that landscape? Grief wound through dense foliage my family’s deception a gemstone buried many years in acidic soil. I finally unearthed that small hard mass and revealed that who I wasn’t— how I didn’t fit, was at its root. Now I tend my autumn garden and walk its winding paths: one of stone; my life as given one of earth that kept that silence each is someone’s secret tracing soulprints toward home.