I burned my arm on a hot light bulb yesterday.
Leave it to me to maneuver about my attic in 90 degree heat (God knows what the attic temp might have been) but upon my descent via the ladder stairs, I managed to skim my skin past the old Edison and hit the garage floor balancing a box of dated income tax returns in one hand while blowing cool the toasted oval reminiscent of a muffler burn reddening the inside of my inner arm.
Actually, it's not the first time I've been burned. A few years back, I brushed my elbow against an unshaded bulb and my skin singed before I yanked back in pain. At six years of age, I scrambled to iron hair ribbons as my mother turned her back from wrinkled sheets to answer the phone.
Don't you dare, she warned, tethered by a coil of telephone core. Don't you dare pick that up.
I dropped the iron on my forearm. Wasn't the last stint, either. In college, I ironed my leg while sitting on the floor pressing a shirt on a pillow case while watching a rerun of the Wizard of Oz.
My son is certain that in a previous life I may have been Joan of Arc. No one, he has told me, has been burned as many times as you.
Earlier this week, a law enforcement officer knocked on the door to verify my family member continued to live at our address. Off probation for several months, our loved one had almost managed to put the nightmare of the last five years behind us. Then the knock at the door, to carry out a condescending city ordinance put in place by a scared-to-death city council--serving to remind we as a family may never get past a wrinkle in our lifetime.
That we will continue to be burned. That we family members will continue to feel the sting and the pain of collateral damage.
That we all will never live the life to which we deserve, of which we aspire.
Because we absolutely cannot get past the ex post facto sex offender laws continuing to be stacked against us.
I'm tired of constantly feeling the heat. I'm tired of bearing the scars.
When will it end?
When?
