My life is captured and kept and kept captured. My life is hermetically sealed. On the shelf on the wall, under the green light I have caught up my life.

1. My purpose murky, and floating with pulpy bits.
2. My esteem shrunk and hidden in the emerald brine.
3. Hope and despair in the same jar, reacting.
4. My faith, assorted, distorted.
5. My libido, limp and useless, half-dead preserved.
6. Talent tricked, trapped, trampled.
7. My young appetites, wrought, overwrought, underfed.

And my habitat on the shelf.

1. My old furniture.
2. My lumpy bed.
3. My scarred and ancient Ikea desk.
4. My discarded fridge, memorialized.
5. My knicks.
6. My knacks.
7. And my bric a brac.

And here’s a row of something I thought I needed to remember.

1. That Christmas I counted coming for months.
2. 13 bee stings and an ice bath in the hospital.
3. Dark scared nights in another hospital with a broken eye.
4. I ran away for about an hour. When I got home nobody had noticed.
5. On our way for hotdogs, my dad pushed my mom out of the moving car.
6. The smell of the summer-heated slide in the park.
7. Building a snow fort with my dad.

On the top shelf, saved and precious, what hasn’t happened yet.

1. That’s me in a bookstore and that’s my book on the shelf.
2. Dancing with my eyes closed — somewhere that it isn’t my living room.
3. Excited, nervous, and a little dumb, my pictures on the wall, a gallery.
4. A cabin in the north where dad and I will, for the first time, talk.
5. A quiet wide open unspoiled moment.
6. Where the sun comes over the ocean and nowhere else I need to be.
7. When I touch her face, I know that I know a love that lasts.

Here is my life hermetically sealed. It was Hermes, the father of alchemy, that kept with him an emerald on which was recorded all philosophy. Meanwhile, a butterfly collector will always kill the things he loves in order to keep them.

SS