Prompt: If your brain were a physical place, what would it be like?
My brain (or my mind) would be a sponge. Not square or rectangular. Not round or oval or spherelike. Amorphous – yeah, that’s the word (I just ‘googled’ it), without a clearly defined shape, etc., etc., and ever bending and twisting and dancing and cringing and weeping – depending on what is soaked into it or wrung out of it.
Sometimes those things – be they people or places or songs or events – become part of the sponge or the structure of me, not something that can be wrung out. And sometimes pieces or molecules of the sponge break off or even disappear for no explainable reason.
The sponge grew bigger at first, then smaller under the stress of adolescence, then bigger, then steady, and now sometimes fading around the edges.
We were asked to write about an object. I would have picked a clock if I had done my homework. Not just any clock of course, kiddo, the one you made for us in your shop class in high school.
Why would you pick that?
Because it is still here even though you’re not. Because it still runs – as long as it is fed batteries. Because you made it just like we made you. … Are you still here? Did you hear me? Do you have anything to say?
Yeah. I’m here in the clock and I heard you and no I don’t have anything to say now that I hadn’t said before.
Did you know when you made it?
Know what?
That you were running out of time. Yes, because I knew that we are all running out of time, mom, I just ran faster than you expected because the alligators were not under Noel’s bed. They were under mine.