Ellen Foster

I might be confused sometimes in my head but it is not something you need to talk about. Before you can talk you have to line it all up in order and I had rather just let it swirl around until I am too tired to think. You just let the motion in your head wear you out. Never think about it. You just make a bigger mess that way.

Have you ever felt like you could cry because you know you just heard the most important thing anybody in the world could have spoke at that second?

I could lay here and read all night. I am not able to fall asleep without reading. You have the time when your brain has nothing to do so it rambles. I fool my brain out of that by making it read until it shuts off. I just think it is best to do something right up until you fall asleep.

I could wake her up and ask have you ever been to the ocean? but I already know that answer. She has not. You can tell. It would humble you I whisper to her sleeping if you for one time stood by something stronger than yourself.

But they get some comfort out of the made up stories. And if that helps them get along maybe I should not poke fun.

You can rest with me until somebody comes to get you. We will not say anything. We can rest.

You see if you tell yourself the same tale over and over again enough times then the tellings become separate stories and you will generally fool yourself into forgetting you started with one solitary season out of your life.

Folks do not want to see a body disappear before their very eyes. Not me at least.

When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy. The way I liked best was letting go a poisonous spider in his bed. It would bite him and he'd be dead and swollen up and I would shudder to find him so. Of course I would call the rescue squad and tell them to come quick something's the matter with my daddy. When they come in the house I'm all in a state of shock and just don't know how to act what with two colored boys heaving my dead daddy onto a roller cot. I just stand in the door and look like I'm shaking all over. But I did not kill my daddy. He drank his own self to death the year after the County moved me out. I heard how they found him shut up in the house dead and everything. Next thing I know he's in the ground and the house is rented out to a family of four. All I did was wish him dead real hard every now and then. All I can say for a fact that I am better off now than when he was alive.

Someone once told me that writing is an act of faith. Another person told me that forgiving is also an act of faith. That’s true. I think both heal, both are arts. What a fine thing it is to do both at once.