“My name is Heidi Beth. My favorite color is purple and I like green too. I like to sing ’cause it stirs my soul and it’s fun. I like to draw flowers and gentle designs with the thin felt tip pens my dad gave me four years ago. My hair is brown and curly. My eyes are green and I’m pretty short. This was all given to me. But I like to draw with colors and I try to be kind.
I learned how to waitress the day after I turned seventeen and I still do it. I wrote a story about a monster named “Hugo” when I was six. That’s “Huge O” I yelled at my dad when he read it wrong. I don’t know what it’s like to have brothers and sisters even though my parents wanted this for all of us. I’d sometimes curl up in my bedroom closet, try hard to figure out the beige telephone, and fall asleep mid-investigation, sometimes lonely, sometimes tired.
I like to climb trees, to get way up in the branches and look at the patterns in wood, watch the sky through the leaves and forget about the ground. Birds didn’t come to the trees when I was up in them. I won’t watch scary movies and I cry in all human directions. I like the soft sound of a pick pulling single strings of an acoustic guitar.
When I was little I thought there’d be these lines I’d cross when I belonged, grew up, succeeded…and now I see life as a dance, round and round to this beautiful music. I have to be quiet to hear it, and to feel the swan like motion. I’m hard on myself when I mess up, and I spend too much energy censoring myself according to what I think other people think of me. Always I look back and see that I only knew the skin of reality, even in my own motivations. I keep trying to learn and get more grown up. I like to take naps in the afternoon in winter. What’s your name?”