I'm still the same as I was that day, still exactly the same. this is the same skin I had then. It's the same skin I had before, and then, and I still have it now, and if you look at it that way, boy my skin sure has been through a lot.
I'm still the same as that day when I answered the phone and it was him. It was his voice coming out of that little slimline phone in the tiny built-in phone nook in that weird old kitchen from 1930. And it sounded like him, too, only stretched out really thin and far away. And I was so mad I just couldn't cry. But I couldn't say anything either, I just gave her the phone and she started screaming before her mouth even caught up with the speaker. Screaming like she better get a head start, or she might turn and look and see that he was gone again.
She screamed and screamed and sometimes it was words and sometimes it wasn't. And there I was, outside, just laying on the ground in that in-between spot, between the two sets of stairs of six steps each, on that scratchy old pavement that I swear was the same pavement from 1930. It was warm so I guess it was summer. And the sky was blue, and I just stared straight up in my staring contest with the blue, maybe looking for him or god or something else entirely. Just staring. Just me. Just laying on the warm scratchy pavement in between, with her screaming and his thin voice and me just trying not to fly off into space.
Cause they taught us that, you know. They taught us that the earth spins so fast that we just can't fall off. The earth holds us to itself and squeezes and sucks us down into itself. And we can't possibly fall off. But I'm telling you, Alice, that day I wasn't so sure about all that gravity stuff. Just between you and me, I know I felt it slip a little, and ol' earth almost dropped me right on out into nothing, just me and nothing. just the same me as before, and I don't think anything has been the same since, Alice. Just me.
