by Lisa K. Buchanan
Did you know, I asked my teacher, that when the sun goes down, it gets dark?
She had been gently warning me that if I didn’t stop wetting myself at naptime, it meant no more pre-school, as in no more fingerpaints or read-aloud pages or giggling with other gigglers.
That was before my bladder was diagnosed with an anatomical abnormality; before it would rectify itself when I “became a lady”; before I understood that to mean the onset of puberty; before the interim years of painful treatments, always a Friday at five o’clock, the waiting room empty when the nurse uncovered the instrument tray and I began to scream.
Today, I’d gratefully surrender to an afternoon nap, but at age four, I knew that if my bladder and I became horizontal, we were doomed. When the teacher lowered the classroom window shades, I pressed my eyeballs open and my thighs together, battling the downward pull of drowsy lunch-bellied warmth, struggling behind my fluttery eyelids with their pink splashes and glowy streaks, my fiery orange hopes inevitably sinking below their horizon, as the dusk fully darkened.
When I answered Miss Gibson’s warnings with my observation about sunsets, a new language had found me long before I knew what it was: color, metaphor, nature as mood-mirror, altogether, the most available alternative to shame.
Writings by Lisa K. Buchanan (lisakbuchanan.com) appear in CRAFT, The Citron Review, and elsewhere. Foes: fellow bus passengers with shoulder bags near her nose. Friends: anyone not preceding her in line for a lemon bar. Heroes: public librarians.
Photo by Josh Withers on Unsplash
