This One's For Me - Ellen Lutnick

Consider the inside of your brain a forest.

Every day you plant a new row of trees. You're growing, see?

You're busy gathering, so busy planting, and you love it, but it's dirty work. You go to bed every night with a sore back, swollen knees. It's hard work but you love it. It's your brain, after all, the home you're stuck with.

One day you step back to survey the forest. You expect all your hard work to make straight lines and strong branches and growth worth celebrating, but instead there is catastrophe. There are only misshapen twisted trunks growing sideways instead of up, leaf-less branches that can't find the sun, and rot that runs down to the roots.

So you set the whole thing on fire and start over.

As you dig the soil to build again, you discover an avalanche of bones.

You knew who they belonged to once, before they belonged to you. You stand in the rubble, trying to sort them by name, by shape, by smell, and nothing really makes sense, you can't sleep, until you get fed up at the mess and start put them together into a new shape. First a foundation, then a frame, windows, a cathedral of a room and a staircase that ends at the top of what trees are left, a skylight to let in the sun, to stare at the stars and contemplate where to go next.

Anyways, this is a story. And your brain isn't a forest but mine might be. If it were, I'd invite you in, let you touch the trees and smell the soot. I'd open the door so we could watch together as the sun set behind the palace of bones, dance in the great hall under the chandelier made out of teeth. You could laugh with me, cry with me, sleep next to me holding hands and dream in my colors but make no mistake, this is not your story. Leave your ego at the edge of the woods, your judgment, your expectations, any preconceived notion of a woman, of what it means to be human, leave your brain out of this mess because it's not yours to claim. This is my story. And you can listen, but make no mistake this story isn't for you. This one's for me.