Laying down bedrock

I’m a little late for work because I was waiting for a package. And not even a really important package, but one you have to sign for and when you aren’t there they leave you a slip that says they were there and then you have to drive to some creepy warehouse in the dark on a big hill at a certain time or wait until tomorrow and I don’t want to wait.
The last time I rode up with Pat to the creepy warehouse in the dark on a big hill, I was texting a friend and she said her father said I seemed like a person who holds a lot in. And he was right. And a time before that, a couple years ago, he said I was like an orphan and he was right about that too, that I was alone in the East and I didn’t have a lot of people, only myself and a family that wasn’t mine, but I desperately wanted to be a part of just to be a part of something.
But time happens in layers. Bedrocks build eventual soil.
My banana just opened backwards.
Tomorrow I have to give an award for work. I have to stand in front of a bunch of people and be filmed speaking in front of a lot of people and be filmed. It’s not live, thank god, so they can cut me out completely if I turn too red and explode the wrong way. But the speech is cookie-cutter, short, not many big words, so hopefully my tongue won’t trip over itself and I think maybe a year ago I would have been so terrified at the thought that I’d never act upon it. And now I’m still terrified, but I feel a little older and they are high school kids receiving art awards and someone at work thought I was a great artist to represent the company and so I’ll ride their opinion of me for a little while because she doesn’t even know the half of it. At least art is something I believe in because I hope I would never get up and give awards to car salesmen or politicians. Mainly, the event is taking place on the night of a much bigger event that more people attend. But I’ll take the small fries. It will be good practice for when I get up and speak my own words, my own poems, my own voice and bones.
I remember when my friend told me her dad said that and I was terrified that someone could see me like that, but some part of me wanted to be seen. All the armor I’d placed around me really isn’t armor at all, it’s just skin and bone. There are people in the world who see. There are people in the world who don’t. And slowly, very slowly in the layers of the life that I’m building, I’m adding more soil, more dirt, more surfaces for worms and birds and tiny leaves to grow.