Moving (on)

Last night, I finished I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, and lingered over its poetic exactitude. No word seemed out of place. Just when the prose began to drag, usually from the weight of one of life’s/Angelou’s many trials, I was shocked to alertness, (literally) passed through the waking state, to a world of Sight unlike my own. Although the following analogy is, structurally, a bit mundane, the following comparison indicates a change in both Angelou’s way of Seeing, and recalls a change in my own. Here Angelou is an independent teenager, made more resilient and perceptive after her “vacation” in Mexico:

My car was an island and the junky an island at sea, and I was all alone and full of warm. The mainland was just a decision away. (245)

Though I cannot remember a time when I have felt completely alone, I can remember the familiar security of self-imposed isolation. As a teenager, I was prone to hysterical outbursts, the sources of which escape me. I locked myself away in the bathroom, sobbing over disproportionate feelings of humiliation, rage, and loneliness. One glimpse of my swollen face sent me into harder, sadder fits. Our “islands” could not be built on more different mounds of sand, heaps of feeling – mine anger and alienation, hers dejection then confidence – but, still, we felt alone. We left to find our own place, on our own accord. Reconnection “was just a decision away”: I splash water on my face and unlock the door, she returns to the violent Dolores and her rakish Father Bailey. With these decisions come consequences, of course, but I think in the back of our minds, we knew this wasn’t an expulsion, but a departure; we packed our bags for a safe haven, found it, spent some time there. We needed to run away from home. (Though when I think about my example, I locked myself an unoccupied room, yet one in my house. I didn’t think that through entirely…)