She struggled with the escaping the sun in the afternoon. All the time she spent trying to leave behind the day, chasing the shadows into the windowless rooms of bars that lined the corners of our neighborhoods.

I felt for her.

Her sunken eyes were crates and cavities that checkered the choices that led her out of the sky and into the gallows where the drunks just hung around. Those days she spent languishing in the heat, her nails that bent backwards by steel plates – all before they snapped off. When I ran my fingers along her wrist, I’d stop at the palm. The tips of her hand were too sensitive to touch.

Over the past 15 years, during our formative years, the mistake on the lake – Cleveland, Ohio – lost over 300,000 manufacturing jobs. All over the city, there were pockets of abandoned brick fortresses and rusted machine equipment. Just a wasteland of things that had been abandoned – things that were left to time.

It was no surprise that even in the darkness, she’d watch me. We were used to the darkness. Sometimes from the table she’d watch, and other times, she’d stand stoically in the doorway, measuring and studying my face as I read through another stack of books.

“Always so busy,” she said, knowing I was just designed that way.

Her father had worked in the same factory – or similar factory, I had trouble deciphering the way the tribes divided up the land – as she had. Her father assembled airplane batteries in a factory that sat behind a fence that didn’t hold much in or keep much out.

“That’s how the city works,” she said.

My father retired early, but not by choice. One of his diseases took everything from him.

“Cancer?” She asked.

“Drugs,” I said.

“Drugs,” she repeated.

“Alcohol too,” I said.

“A shame,” she said with a beer in her hand.

“We are,” I agreed.

We weren’t impervious to the winds of the past. I couldn’t expect her to outgrow the places her palms said she was going. Her calloused hands wrenched at the bun she tried in her hair. That was what she did every night. She never let it down. I couldn’t blame her.

“It’s too much work,” she said from the couch. The window was open, and the sunlight was speckling her body. She looked like she was ready to break into a million pieces. A million pieces I’d clean up.

“I’m leaving,” I said.

Things we expected.

There was never a plan for her to get out. No one left her bread crumbs to follow. She struggled along through the weeds and thickets that climbed the base of her family tree.

“You’re lucky,” she said.

I didn’t disagree.

“This won’t be your life forever,” I said.

She didn’t disagree.

Violent crimes in Cleveland were commonplace. Some people said there was an epidemic, but epidemic wasn’t the right word – not in my opinion. There’s a connotation to the word that implies people care – that there’s a way to stop it. To me, Cleveland and its crime and its poverty and its empty buildings with graffiti writing to ghosts of the workers that used to punch-in just they could punch-out, was commonplace.

It was our lives.

I left for college the next night. I remember hearing the words that came back to me after I howled at the moon. It was her voice, and it was all raveled up in the weeds, and it was all weighed down by the nickel plated dust that she swallowed on those long days she spent surviving.

“Don’t you ever come back home to the house of the greatest lakes. There are giants made of metal waiting to grind your bones,” she said. “Just like they did our fathers.”

# # #

Photo credit: Larry Thacker  larrydthacker.com