Detroit Life

Upon returning back here, I could feel the weirdness, like the Great and Powerful “Nothing” was taking over. The city took to kicking me…hard almost immediately, laying out bullshit hoops for me to leap majestically through. There was a general disgruntlement about the life that was unfolding in front of my eyes. It didn’t take long after I planted my feet firmly on the ground here that it occurred to me what had just transpired in my life. I was alone. I had chucked every last bit of myself up into the air and was waiting to see where all the little fragments would land and how they could reconstruct themselves.
Hearing that I was weakened and broken from my travels and I had some how lost my sovereignty, was becoming tiresome. Coming back wasn’t enough, I needed to understand that I had abandoned my people and this place (like so many others before me) and my loyalty was in question. I was sure leaving a good job and stability in search of inspiration and opportunity in Detroit would be enough but sadly, no. So I waved my white flag and gave in to the beating at hand.
After struggling for a couple months at a friends house it became clear that I wasn’t able to do this on my own and I wasn’t having any success from the latitude and longitude I was standing, currently. In an effort to straighten out the jumbled mess that had become the contents of my brain, I retreated to the city. There I found a very busy friend with a frequently empty, 8th floor apartment in a deserted neighborhood. A quiet place to rest for a while since most people were too afraid or didn’t want to make the drive to retrieve me from there. Needless to say, I loved it.
One night after too much time alone and a few too many sips from a bottle of whiskey I was struck by genius. It had been my pride all along that had been getting in the way and I needed a metaphor to stomp it down with. Always with a flare for the dramatic, I grabbed a full bottle of red wine and marched directly to the roof. My intent was to polish off the entirety of the wine as fast as my body would allow, then throw the bottle to it’s death, a shattered destiny in some dark alley somewhere on a lost street in the depths of Downtown Detroit where it would be indistinguishable from any part of the ground to any passers by. The pride I held too dearly was going to be thrown to the wind. It’s a weak metaphor, I know but it is what it is.
A fantastic scene for the quiet theatrics of a shy woman.
Leaning my head back I started to pour the wine past my lips and down my throat, mostly succeeding. I figured the drops on my chin along with the small, steady stream that had formed at the corner of my mouth and was going down my neck made for good imagery. Between swallows, giving myself moments to breath I would practice the toss. Testing the weight, making sure I was close enough to the edge of the building to ensure it would take flight and descend into the darkness.
As I came to the end of the bottle I prepared my stance. The drunken shoes that were holding me up were already starting to wobble a little and the gravity seemed slightly more intense in this particular spot than it had been in other places but I figured it would be fine. With one flick of my wrist I released the bottle into the wild. As it spun so did my feet. My ankles twisting up underneath me. In a final betrayal of my body, I landed square on my butt. My vision coming back to me just in time to see the bottle land on the old, moldy, futon mattress and roll off onto the roof under it, completely unscathed.

Perfect.
The joke was on me.
As if the city responded, “Welcome Home! Here’s some hard gravel for your drink ass! Now get up, dust yourself off, take a freakin shower and act like you had purpose to showing your face around here again!”
That’s when I started yelling at the sky, all my inhibitions dissolving somewhere between inebriation and sheer frustration (if only it had rained, that would have been so Leonardo DiCaprio in every movie he’s ever done), “I’LL MAKE YOU A DEAL! I’LL TELL YOUR STORIES AND WORK ON RESOLUTION AS OPPOSED TO DESTRUCTION BUT YOU HAVE TO FEED ME, GOD DAMN IT!…AND GIVE ME A PLACE TO PUT MY VOICE!”
So here it is, my little part of the world, my little soap box to stand on and repeat the tales that the concrete whispers in my ears.
May you love them, may you hate them…may you read them.