alice, will you KINDLY pay attention to your history lesson!

but how can one possibly pay attention to a book with no PICTURES in it?

you forget. after your shoes get past a certain point you tend to 
candy-coat the past with these found shoelaced memories of love lingered 
and love lost and happy smiling faces and mudprints on the wall, and you 
forget the taunts of tortured words that haunted your youth, all of the 
merciless cruelty of young teenagers, the ones first hitting adolesence 
with their evil tongues...today i went to charlie's school to eat lunch 
with him, a simple request, and all happy from the afterglow of this 
weekend i decked myself out in my finery and my blue shawl with the moon 
and stars and the jupiter dress and all of the other makings of an 
imaginary girl, stuck myself in the narrow hallways of a middle school 
twice as big as my high school ever was, watching the paintings move on 
the wall with significant bleeding talent from children with starving 
hearts...and so many eyes on me, more, so many more than when i stand in 
parking lots, or when my eyes go sideways, or even here when stupid people 
decide to make remarks on how silly my words are. so many more harsh 
glances, and then the tauntings began, shielding my brother from their 
usual gnashing remarks now directed at me...silly things, really. but so 
many, and so much, and relentless. wagging tongues, small dogs whelping 
because one began parking a few minutes ago. and my mind went tracking 
back in time, to those days when the page of swords and i made our 
bubblescent world of cowboys and indians and time travel and empresses of 
time and darkness and strange rock stars and vampires and lestat and louis 
and we shut the rest of the world out, those same sneering lips that bit 
and tore and, when i got a little bit older, stuck gum in my hair and 
fondeled my thighs on school buses. insane, what children do to eachother. 
and i glanced around at my charlie's handful of penny-pocket friends, in 
their black tshirts and long hair, obsessed with their shattered heart 
music and collecting wallet chains, especially kurt, the black-haired boy, 
he's hurting the worse...his mother left him much the way my father did, 
and now she's on the other side of the world far away from him, where 
she's been since he was merely three years of age...and his heart, so 
brittle and bitter, so empty, and he stuffs it full of cigarettes and 
drugs and makes his biting comments and his eyes never leave me, as if 
he's searching for something...acceptance? acknowledgement? i give him my 
lunch money, and he says he'll buy a wallet with it...and i secretly wish 
on those million of glow-in-the-dark stars back home that a wallet is all 
he will buy...whatever happened to make these children hurt so much, to 
reject automatically anything that is different from him, that send those 
of us with poetry and song in our hearts to are dark corners where we 
whittle away the time until the world wants us again...

so peter pan gathers her lost children at one table in the lunchroom and 
diverts the attention from them for a short while, accepting it all 
herself, much stronger and able to deal with such relentless 
tauntings...she's done it before. and after all, they're never gonna fly. 
they don't know how. but these few, maybe they'll learn...at least they'd 
be the ones to dare, if anyone's ever going to. i can only hope that when 
the time comes, they still believe...if they believe now.

then, of course, there was the whole structure of this prison called 
school, all of the silly rules, all of the harsh punishments, all of the 
"don't step past this line" and all of the different ways to break a 
child's spirit...these lines and rules and regulations and yardsticks i 
had forgotten, having to raise your hand before you empty your tray at 
lunch, allowed a mere ten minutes in this little patch of grass outside, 
silliness. so much absurdity, so much i just wanted to break and scream 
and ask "why? why? can't you see how much you are killing in these 
children? look at their eyes!" but, as always, keep your mouth shut and 
your feet together and maybe they won't see your checkered tights and your 
laced up buckle down boots.

but this weekend...to find heaven in a short few days. curled up in my 
soft nest of yarn and golden hair. calling the storms, the rains, the 
floods, eating honeysuckle in the shadow, playing video games and dancing 
around, having long conversations with the ring master. every morning, 
these strong arms in a soft embrace, these lips in my hair, this breathing 
angel asleep beside me, every night...so amazing, incredible, so much...in 
defiance of words. in defiance of time, of distance, and yes love is 
stronger than any other magic you could possibly imagine...my soul feels 
cleansed, my body in this shower of fulfillment and peace, things that 
could not be explained even if i wished to share them. but some 
things...some moments, some days, some essences...they must be guarded 
forever in the castles and battlements of a heart, because those 
moments...those instances are what makes up a forever. and a forever, even 
one, stretched itself beyond the futile descriptions of meager words. so 
this is my secret, this weekend. this one with my angel, this one with 
cuddles and giggles and falling down and rolling around and my toes may 
bleed and my lilacs may bloom and all of it, every single moment, is for 
him, and us, and the space that is not space, was never space, that is 
inbetween. that which has never separated us. i love him. i love him 
because he plays nintendo games, because he thinks snickers ice cream bars 
are small miracles, because he has the guts to call up complete strangers 
in hopes they might be the ring master's lost love. i love him because he 
chases my cat around, because he wears my multicolored skirt in the 
mornings when he moves into the kitchen to find breakfast, because he 
isn't ticklish and that annoys the piss out of me...because he is. and 
that's all that has to be.