Anna in the Free-Floating World

Anna was a small girl who had caused a lot of trouble for her family.   They did not know where she was.   Anna did not know where she was either.   She was eighteen years old and she was in her car, somewhere in America.   Sometimes she thought it might be Nevada, sometimes it was Texas, or Colorado.   Sometimes she thought she was approaching a place and that when she arrived someone would explain everything to her, but she never got anywhere and nobody could ever figure out why she was where she was or what she was talking about.

Anna had become smaller and smaller over the summer months.   She was shrinking into a wisp of a thing, as light as a feather, so that when she appeared at various rest stops and restaurants along Interstate 80, whispering to strangers in that thin, limp voice of hers, “I’m hungry,” people tore off parts of their sandwiches and handed them over, like feeding a bird.

She did not know why no one loved her.   But it was her fault.   Anna was not the baby bunny in the story book.   The mama bunny would not come out to find her, saying if you become a bird and fly away from me, I will be the tree that you come home to.   No.   Anna was not lovable like that and her mother had told her not to come home small and unclean.

Anna had vivid dreams about her mother.   Sometimes her mother was large and looming like the eyes of God, and other times she was shrinking like Anna herself.   Her mother was trying to disappear, but not without a scream.   She was water circling and vanishing down a bathtub drain.

Anna woke up in her car.   The bright cold light of fall in the hills stung her face.   She took a long last look in the mirror.   Her pretty hair was such a mess, mama could not have guessed what Anna had become.

It was her car but it was such an old car and now it wouldn’t go any farther.   She parked it off the road, a little ways up in the dirt where anyone could find it.   But within a mile or two Anna could disappear completely among the little towns that dotted the jagged interstate.

It had been a bad summer, after a good spring, after a really bad year.   Over the course of it Anna had lost everything and now she’d have to leave the car.   It was just one more break away from the world of things.   Things keep you in place.   And people.   People always bring you back to them.

The world seemed very large without the car.   She started walking along the highway, and as she walked she talked to herself.   I have the sky, she thought.   That is mine.   I have the long flat road where people come and go.   After a while there were so many things to name she could not hold them all in her hands and pockets.   She stopped and stretched her long arms out in the sunshine.   She said the names of things dropping like leaves from a windy bough.

I am Anna, she said. I will be my tree.