POSTCARDS

The following were written as part of an assignment for my nonfiction class, in which we were challenged to write postcard-length snippets of personal memoir.
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I am not sure if I ever believed that I was beautiful, but I always knew that a pretty dress would more than compensate for any lacking in other departments.  It did not matter what my face or my hair looked like, because when I surveyed myself mirror-less, the dress was the sum of my splendor.  At five, my mother kept my hair too short even for me to feel it around my face.  I was supremely envious of the Amish girls, whose braids seemed never-ending, cascading in blessed ropes down the backs of their dark-colored dresses.  My own dress – the only one that mattered, in those days – was pink.  It annoyed my mother, but to me it was perfect.  I was only allowed to wear it on the days when we did not leave the house.  When the lacy petticoat swirled around my legs, I was as beautiful as an Amish girl, as worldly as a forbidden luxury eyed cautiously from the back window of a horse-drawn buggy. 

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There are always ships in the distance.  I always see them.  They are deceptively small as they rise on the horizon, coming toward me in an innocuous, gentle way.  My first ship was adulthood.  It was a grim galleon, but from the safe shores of primary school it looked to be leagues away.  I dawdled through years of ignorance without stocking the ammunition I would have needed to sink it, without enlisting the allies who would have joined me against it.  I heard but did not heed the cries of the gulls who warned me of its approach.  There always seemed to be something closer at hand that required my focus.  I might have been learning to ride a bike, or a car – riding in a more culpable way, riding towards a square on the calendar that meant nothing but changed everything.  There are certain rules of nature that even the ships obey.  Even the clock knows instinctively the way of it: even he leers at me, now.  Now the ships dock so quickly that I do not have the luxury of surveying the future slowly on the waves.  It peers through my windows as I sleep.