Kathi with an “i,” she’s the one you want to talk to if you want to set your world alight

No one told me about her blue eyes, how they matched her gloves, or maybe her hands and the ice-cold blood frozen solid in them like claws.

No one told me she’d look through me, and through everything I’d ever done. What she doesn’t say—what she refuses to say—is so much more deadly than anything she might have screamed.

But is that rosacea, is she maybe ill or something? Is the ghost at her feet the same one dogging my every step? Might we have more in common than not?

Might we have been friends in another life where I’m the one who approached her to tell her who I was, that I wasn’t a threat to her or anyone. That I was only trying to live my life…

And all of her friends she keeps in that jar, I’m probably the type to let them just be. Unless they needed help. They may need her and I might be making assumptions again.

There I go damning her and in so doing, myself, because we all know there’s a mirror at the end of every action, every gesture, every thought, every sentence.

What I do to her I do to the world. “This is what I think of you, this is what I think of myself.”

So of course I’m going to reach out to her if her arms are locked at her sides. And, yes, I’m going to ask if she needs someone to talk to because I know these days I do too.

Kathi with an “i,” she’s the one you want to talk to if you want to set your world alight

I’m not the one punching walls bare-knuckled anymore, I’m not contemplating strength and anger.

And it isn’t the sciatica acting up again, the pain that impels me to reach out to everyone in the world to tell them, “I understand your plight.” It’s these damned slow steps I’m forced to take, it’s having to sit down every fifteen minutes to silence my own screaming nerves.

It’s the silence where I’m filling it with fires in oil drums placed all over this abandoned hotel. Each room opened like a diorama that everyone might see how everyone else lives, and listen to how everyone dreams.

So everyone might witness the movie that is a life that is a stone-faced silence to the question, “What do you make of all this—I’d really like to know…”