Somebody Somewhere Read Free Page B

he was trying to meet me in mine.
    —
    “Donna,” called Tim from the kitchen. We’d collected the colored foil wrappers from a box full of chocolates. I took some and smoothed them flat, laying them out in a repeating pattern. I was getting lost in the colors until I
was
the colors.
    With a pair of scissors, Tim began to cut a wrapper into tiny strips and then tiny squares. I took my squares one by one, crimped them in the middle, and made bows out of them. My pile was getting smaller.
    “What are you doing?” I asked, watching these shiny foil extensions of myself become disintegrated by Tim.
    Tim got a jar, scrubbed the label off, and brought it over to the bench where the sparkly bits were. One of his big hands swept the bench clean, and the sparkly pieces of him and me fell together into the glass jar. He put the lid on this world under glass and shook it. The bits of him and me danced around and touched each other.
    —
    For my first three years I had moved freely within “my world” observed incomprehensibly by “the world” which moved around me. Progressively Donna was seen in smaller and smaller snapshots until there was no longer any freedom to be a self within the grasp of “the world.” In my teens the walls had cracked and I was back for a few silent “my world” months. But the walls had been patched up, not with bandages but with steel doors and solid concrete. At twenty-two I had met someone else like myself for the first time in my life. Without tools, I began to smash my way out with my bare hands but gave up. At twenty-five I had met another “my worlder” and I washanded the tools. I attacked—with everything I had—the walls I had built so well.
    In writing the autobiography, Willie, Carol, and I each began to become fully aware of who each of us was and what each of us had lived. A self must have a past. The book was the only place in which that past was strung together as a whole, but it was a start. We had foundations to build upon.
    In the solitary confinement of a London flat, the entire story had been spewed onto paper in the course of four weeks. There had been no thought or planning. There was only obsession and compulsion that what was begun had to run its course. More than a book, it had been an exorcism. Writing it had been like a fever before the waking.
    Words had attacked the pages, my fingers striking the keys of the plastic typewriter with such speed and ferocity that the manuscript felt like it was written in braille. There was little awareness of what was being written. It hadn’t been rewritten, reviewed, or revised. The first awareness of the words came as they were read from each page. In four haunting weeks, Willie, Carol, and I came closer to living together simultaneously than we had in twenty-five years.
    As we read the final manuscript we each laughed and cried and feared and burned with anger for parts of each other’s lives we had been unable to control.

    I looked at Tim and wondered whether he would be part of a new future or whether we were somehow drinking a toast to the past. I was a bird newly freed from a cage. I had too much yet to discover and needed no reminders of a life before freedom—even at the cost of leaving my would-be rescuers behind.

    O n what seemed like the edge of the earth, I sat alone, perched on a cliff above the incoming tide of a familiar Australian beach. Thenight was a midnight blue and the moonlight danced wildly in sparkles upon the waves. My fingers ran through the grass as the summer’s-night wind ran its fingers through my hair. My hair was full of the wild, free smell of the ocean wind and it streamed out to the side as I turned my face into the breeze. I was an albatross on the mainland. I was alone but whole.
    Facing into the wind, the distant city lights mockingly reminded me that although I now had a whole self there was something still missing that seemed perpetually unreachable and “over there,” always just