Acceptance Speech After Setting the World Record in Goosebumps – Andrea Gibson

I wasn’t, by any means, a natural.
Was not one of those wow-hounds
born jaw-dropped. I was tough in the husk.
Went years untouched by rain. Took shelter
seriously, even and often especially
in good weather, my tears like teenagers
hiding under the hoods of my eyes,
so committed they were to never falling
for the joke of astonishment.

When I was told there were seven
wonders of the world, I trusted the math,
believed I had seen none of them.
Of course beauty hunted me.
It hunts everyone. But I outran it, hid
in worry, regret, the promise of an afterlife
or a week’s end.

Then one day, in a red velvet theater
in New Orleans, I watched Maya Angelou
walk on stage. Seventeen slow steps to the mic.
She took a breath before speaking,
and I could hear god being born in that breath.
My every pore reached out like a hand
pointing to the first unsinkable lotus
in the bayou of the universe.
I’d never felt anything like it.
Searched the encyclopedia
for the feeling’s name when I got home:

                        “Goosebumps.”

Afterwards, I thought—I can do this.
Started training morning to night,
tore the caution tape off my life
and let everything touch it.

Allen Iverson on the television
in his first season with the Sixers,
crossover sharp as a V of sparrows
Flying through the paint like Michelangelo’s brush:
272 goosebumps.

My baby sister, sober for the first time
in thirteen years, calling to tell me
she just noticed our mother’s eyes are green:
505 goosebumps.

One day, my friend scored tickets
to a Prince concert. Tiny venue.
I was right behind the sound booth.
Prince’s entire band that evening—women.
At the end of the show the person
turned around and whispered, He didn’t play
one song on his setlist the whole night.

I live on stages. I know what it is
to scratch a plan, but not the whole trip
and still arrive to your destination
two hundred years before your time:
421 (artist formerly known as) goosebumps.

But that’s just the fancy stuff.
Some of them came from simple facts—
It rains diamonds on Jupiter.
Blood donors in Sweden receive a thank you
message when their blood is used.

One night in Michigan, my friend,
still undiagnosed, could not uncurl
her fingers to strum her guitar,
so she sang the chords instead.
It was the first time in my life I’d seen pain
become an instrument:
10 dozen goosebumps
for each and every note plucked up from
the string section of her refusal to silence
her dream.

After that, nothing in the world was gray.
Even the movie of my past was released
in color. The oldest man in my hometown
could not get to the door to listen
to our carols so we went inside and sang
at his bedside instead. Twenty-four boots
on the front step catching snowflakes
with their tongues: 776 goosebumps.

At one point everything started doing it:
A sincere apology, an enemy’s love poem.
The moon rising over the continental divide.
My love and I thought it was a car
driving off a cliff, and suddenly
nothing in the world was dying.
You ever felt that? A split second
when nothing in the world is dying?
888 goosebumps, and the next day
I sharpened a tiny ax
so I could split the seconds myself.
Too much lives in a moment
to not feed it to the fire in the heart, slow.

A Missoula treehouse filled with candlelight.
The octopus documentary.
The biggest dog in the shelter
hiding behind a teacup chihuahua,
and the woman who came to adopt a cat
taking all three of them home.

Me, at home, two months into chemotherapy
watching all of my eyelashes fall onto my cheekbones
and realizing that was 400 wishes
I wouldn’t have made otherwise.

There is no escaping
the magic now. Beauty caught me
and never let me go.
And the thing about the world record
is—if someone breaks it after me,
and they will break it after me,
I will love that so much
that without even trying,
I’ll break it again.