Metaphor

I lay in bed tonight, listening to music I love and having just put down the most amazing book I ever read.1

I felt like screaming to god to get the phrases from other's mouths or pens, melodies from another's mind, ideas from another world out of my head. I reached my hand into the darkness asking, begging to be saved from the drowning I was doing in the large pot of other people. I put on shorts over my sports bra and underwear and went outside.2

I looked up at the roof next to our deck after I had wandered about and done my screaming at god, and I realized that I had never climbed it alone. I wanted to. I needed something physical to get my mind out the restraints it was feeling. I tried once and found myself to afraid to make the leap necessary to get from the railing to the gutter.3

I moved a chair over and did it again, this time jumping from the chair and railing to the roof. I found myself too weak.4

I walked in the front door and saw my denim jacket, put it on thinking I needed a thick skin to be able to climb that wall. It did help; my arms didn't get scraped on my third attempt as on my first. But I merely succeeded in hanging for a few seconds and feeling utterly terrified at falling into where I couldn't touch with my bare toes. I fell then, landed safely in the chair. I went back inside, this time through the back door and I found my trainers and put them on, thinking, a grip on the wall would help.5

It did. The fourth attempt that I made, I got to the point where I was able to swing my legs up onto the roof and ignore the scraping pain of shingle against bare thigh. I precariously balanced and then began to scoot back, two arms and half a leg on the roof, and search for a grip for my other foot. I grabbed the edge of the roof that ran at a right angle to my body and held on while I rolled over to get myself fully on the roof.6

Then I finally relaxed and felt a lovely stinging on the right inner thigh. I looked in the moonlight and saw shimmers of blood. I didn't really notice and crawled through the window, realizing that though, in the process, I had entered and exited the house through the doors, the only important thing to me was to enter it by way of roof and window. Scraped up, oddly dressed and extremely exhilarated, I entered my room and lay down again.7

I was unable to contain the urge to write it down.8

I lived a metaphor tonight. I climbed a roof and ignored pain in order to cause more of it in order to give myself peace by climbing a house.9

I thought my own thoughts, did my own deed.10

I am proud.11