Home.  Usually a place of safety and serenity, for me, home meant broken glass--dishes thrown across the room as if landing them against some part of our bodies became an olympic sport.  The closer to the head, the greater the score evident in my mom’s occasional victory bruises.  Even my bedroom had no solace for me.  The door, unable to lock, seemed more like a dramatic curtain to be thrust open in some grand entrance of a madman than a blockade or a fixture of safety.  To hear the knob turn would send my stomach turning in equal measured rotations, fear filling each cell of my body with cement making me stiff.

“She gags,” my mom confessed to the doctor, holding my leg in some attempt at support.  “She gags when she walks to school.”

“Do you make yourself throw up?”  His eyes peering down at me.  My thighs sticking to the white tissue paper, imprinting the bottom that only the night before saw paddled with a shoe.

“No.  I try not to throw up, sir.”

“What is making you sick to your stomach?”

“Thoughts.”

“Thoughts of what?”

I wasn’t allowed to conclude my missive on thoughts.  I was interrupted by my mother, so graciously changing the subject.  I didn’t want to talk about  those thoughts anyway.  I’d rather not even be here now.  All of this was an embarrassment to me.  Only seven years old and cognizant of the absurdity I faced.  To vomit or not to vomit...that was the question.

“She also picks up things on the way to school,” my mom added in the nick of time.  

“What sorts of things?”

“Twigs.  Pieces of paper,” I said for clarification.  “Just stuff like that.”

“I find them in her bedroom.  She’s got pieces of crap tucked in every corner of her room.  In drawers.  Under her bed.  Even in her toy box.”  Was it disgust I saw on her lips as they rolled up to her nose or was that concern?

“Why do you pick up those sorts of things, Katie?”  His pencil scribbling wildly as to the many ways I’m certifiably nuts, I’m sure.

“Because they’re lonely.”

Months went by with me practicing my prescribed medicine like a compliant patient should:  Count to three when I start to feel sick.  Think of something nice to keep my mind off of vomiting.  Count each step until I get to school to keep my brain from wanting to pick up the “crap” from the gutter.  And, finally...remind myself that those things are dirty and not to be picked up.

The only problem was, I felt dirty and not to be picked up also.  Yet, as I looked down at my hands reaching for the tiny piece of plastic that lie there--in the crook of the curb, where the sidewalk meets the harshness of the asphalt street--I noticed my hands.  Little hands.  Gentle hands.  Hands worth the love of someone.  And feeling so alone, I saw the plastic piece of something that was once whole.   How lonely it too must be, I thought.  Will I ever be whole myself? I wondered.  

I picked up the piece of benign plastic that had once belonged to something bigger, something with purpose, and put it in my pocket and by doing so, I felt I gave it a home.  I gave it a place to be apart of something bigger.  I made it whole again.  It won’t be lonely anymore.

I had quite a collection a vagabond junk swimming in my desk draws besides my Hello Kitty pencils and smelly erasers until one day, my mom made me a pom-pon out of shredded garbage bags.  The “cheer” represented in such an item transferred to me sending energy surging throughout and eventually down to my hands until all I could think to do was shake the pom-pon two and fro.  Side to side.  Back and forth.  My little hands simple too busy to fidget with wayward twigs.

Things random and silly like homemaking for discarded tidbits of junk and fallen twigs persisted in other forms.  I found myself the spokesperson for the unpopular; I would have declared the number 13 to be my favorite had in not been for many nights lost sleep after viewing the trailer.  But other things rejected found a fan in me.  

“What’s your favorite color?” a kid my age would ask as so often done in the first few minutes, the sizing-up period, upon meeting.

“Yellow,” I’d declare with chin up as high as my hopes wished to be.

The response was always the same.  A slack jaw made in disgust, lips curling in some pre-heave dance, nose wrinkling up to the brow and eyes that squinted and stabbed with hateful daggers.

“Ewwww!” followed by some exaggerated gesticulation of nausea or otherwise dissatisfaction.  “Why do you like yellow!?”

“Someone has to like it.  I guess it will be me.”

What reasoning and explanation formed with logic did you expect from a seven year old?  Ask me now and I’ll tell you stories of sunshine and brightness and things that resemble happiness.  My answer is much better formed yet the foundation remains the same:  I felt sorry for the color yellow.  Just like I felt sorry for those fallen fingers of a tree.  Those snapped off appendages of something that once had reason and a purpose.  Those disregarded shards of fabric.  Those pebbles far away from their home, their family...their river.