Sleepless Thoughts
When I was a kid, I didn’t understand why Michael Jackson bought so many toys and super soakers. I didn’t get the childishness and the yearning for younger days; I wanted to grow up and do the traditional Motherhood thing I was always pretending with my baby dolls. I get it now. Now that I know the scope of my tragedy, I totally get it. Lately, I find myself unable to sleep at night. My mind just won’t turn off, tumbling over and over the same fragment of a song, or searching to find the tactile part of a memory of my little sister playing with my hair as we tried to fall asleep during a long, dark night in North Carolina. I’ll toss and turn until finally I grab my phone and start looking up old toys from my childhood: a dollhouse here, a set of pretend play plastic there; recently, I purchased a book, a Beanie Baby, and an old movie I remember watching in 2013. This new part of me, this yawning ache for the untainted familiar, wants to buy every piece I see — every pre-owned bit of d