Things I Almost Understood

A soggy teddy bear lay on the shoulder of the highway— head twisted, limbs askew, its damp fur clinging to gravel and its sightless eyes beseeching heaven. I watched from the backseat, wondering if it was dropped in sorrow or thrown in rage, or left behind after something that didn’t leave anything else. Two women in white nightgowns ran across their front lawn on a frosty full moon night. I saw them from a warm city bus, moving strangely—slow, as if in water or dream. Were they sleepwalkers? Ghosts? A mother and daughter forever circling some moment that couldn’t be undone? I held my hand to a porch light once, and saw the bones inside— like glowing x-rays made by angels. It felt like a secret I wasn’t meant to know yet, but couldn’t unsee. And once, on the coldest morning I remember, I walked between mounds of shoveled snow that rose above my head— a canyon of ice on another planet, strange and silent. At the far end, a two-room schoolhouse waited, and the older girls, all warmth and wonder, looked at me like I might be someone. Maybe I was always watching from windows— warm, confused, a little too given to wonder. Maybe I kept collecting these fragments of strangeness— loss without names, beauty lit from beneath, the weightless hush before knowing— and called it growing up.