Things I Know But Will Not Use In Real Life

I wrote this a few weeks ago. Here's to memory and living for (or in spite of) it.

My first memory unfolded itself in my toddler's hippocampus when I was three years old.
I am sleepy-eyed, watching my uncle eat a fudgesicle from across the room,
tossing its wrapper down his throat with the rest.
The light is rain-grey through smudged glass.
Thirteen years later, I still wonder if it is a dream.

It snowed in Yellowstone National Park on June 26, 2004.
If you want, I can draw how the trees looked driving through them that morning.
I'll sketch the wind's pattern down the mountain, the bumblebee path of the each snowflake settling on the windshield.

I am fifteen and writing poetry for the first time feels like finding a lost pair of glasses.
My best friend and I shatter like laughing lightbulbs, sprawled on the small-city sidewalk, shimmering in sunlight and we
don't remember why.

Today is for testing my memory. Today is for tracking time through trivia. Today I will tell you.

There are more than 20 different ways to break an arm.
My sixth grade band teacher had used 14 of them, he said, and I wonder if it was for intimidation's sake. He spoke in murmurs and the underlying threat of his judo techniques kept me from asking him to speak up.
To this day woodwind instruments make my whole body shiver, bones tingling like wind chimes.

You can bite off your finger with the same force it takes to bite through a carrot
I have threatened my fingers with the strength of my jawbone,
the joints do not sever. Knuckles have entered my throat
and nothing comes out. There is no blood,
no vomit,
no shredding of skin.

It only takes seven pounds of pressure to snap off your ear.
Sound died for me in the bottom of an end-of-summer swimming pool. I was young enough then to forget how to mourn, but ghostly grief has been haunting me lately. I am hyperaware of the absence of hearing like your mouth remembers
a lost tooth.
If my ear were to split from myself, I would hear
nothing but an echo, phantom sound waves
in an empty room.

My uncle is thirty two. It is thirteen years after the Fudgesicle Incident. He's married to a small and beautiful Mexican woman and they give me religious calendars every Christmas. Last year, I wanted to tell him I am no longer Catholic. To explain that one day I might marry someone who uses gender-neutral pronouns,
maybe I won't marry anyone at all.
I am not the bleary-eyed child who watched you eat that morning.
My uncle,
I worry you will not love me.
I stayed silent. The light is rain-gray but waning this time.

It did not snow in Black Hills, South Dakota on July 23, 2012.
If you want, I can sketch you the path of the road through the mountains and my finger will trace the outline of  heat over the blacktop, draw a line in the creek bed where I wanted my blood to leach itself into the water.
I will make a map for the route back home.

I am sixteen and writing poetry still feels like looking for my glasses.
My best friend and I laugh ourselves to pieces on the pavement all over again
and I now remember why.