Short Story # 2. Healing a Poet May be Harder Than Painting

Look beneath the floorboards for the stories I have hid.


I walked into the house the other night, my parents were chatting with my father's friend before he and his friend went out and my mother to work. A box of wine and dining room chairs marked it was Friday night. Nonchalantly entering the house to grab some food after work my parents cheerfully said, "Here is the poet." Which I brushed off, because I do consider myself a poet, but then I did one of those movie-like, 'wait go back what did you say' moments. They said it again. This time adding an adjective "secret"--thus Genevieve the secret poet.

My fathers friend went onto explain that he has a son that is in a semi-famous band and that he never knew about this. Its strange. How well do we even know those closest to us? How well do we know the person we see every morning, as we scrub our teeth and comb our hair to impress those we think we know?

I was thinking I know my parents from when there were age 23 and 26, the moment I started living, but before that who were they and how did they view the world. That's their secret for me. And though I ponder, I don't ask, out of fear of closeness. Sometimes I try to look at family as if they are just people I'm close to, trying to see something I haven't before. My mother as just Elizabeth, and see how she sees herself, my Dad as Stephen the golfer/drummer, Grace as just some loving hippie, and Charlotte and Noah as people not part of an intricate and complex family mosaic.

I also sometimes wish and hope that the word and verb 'heal' could take over my life. I say it more often than not that I need to be healed or someone in my life needs to be healed, or that once I'm healed everything in my life will merge into a cosmic whole of no return, a good reaching point. I find myself in nature most days, pensive, understanding those days heal me, piece rough edges back together, repair torn capillaries, the lungs clearer and crisper on a cold fall day.

I'm now unsure what I mean by healed. Instead of healed I would rather view things as an abstract painting. Where you can stand in a museum, in a square room with a bust statue in the center, white walls, illuminated paintings and your not sure what to make of some be-loved work, a well-known one. You know the pain and suffering that went into making the painting, the debilitating battles of where to place the brush, how to translate feelings to material. You see the texture on the canvas, the deep understanding of color, and for a moment you get lost in the painting seeping into the already dried and weathered oil, and begin to appreciate it for what it is, not the harsh lines drawn across the indented canvas that compose the whole.

Instead of being healed or in the "ing" phase--healing, I'd rather be a completed painting on a once stark white canvas, on stark white walls, illuminated with the most cautious lighting and composed of the softest brush strokes, the harshest lines and the most eloquent waves.

My parents call me their poet. For a while I was a poet to myself and to my pen and paper. The words have freed me from a canvas to the world, where they can heal, more than I will ever know.

**as most of my other stories, it is in the process of major re-vamping.