Memories of a child are difficult to recollect. Thoughts, impossibly so. Through a tempered lens of years given over to naval-gazing, it is not only the subject matter that becomes scuffed and scratched. The glass accumulates the silt of more recent reveries, of thoughts piled on thoughts, a mound of smudged recall that illuminates nothing, sends back to the mind of a thing that is no longer you, no longer a person. A person you are no longer. Something scattered, picked over in snatches.
I can’t. I can’t remember that me, that cross section. Do I want to? I don’t know. I remember those feelings, I think? Vague, they echo down hallways of age, corridors better left darkened behind my back. There was a book I remember reading in school, not long after that pretty thing with the auburn waves, the crying eyes always on the verge of tears, the smile that against all odds never left me after she did… there was a book I remember reading not long after the affection obtained became affection denied, not long after that joy left me abruptly, not long after I found a sick hole in my gut. That grasping craving for something to connect me to people, to make me feel not so alone. Was that what that feeling was, or is that this feeling now, projected?
I like to think I was sweet. I like to think she was sweeter. Maybe those things are both true. I want them to be. The book has never left me. Not the lesson anyway. No axiom, nothing so quaint, never so easy. But a lesson all the same. The story of a rodent and a man, the story of them getting smart, the story of them finding joy, losing joy, losing smart, finding joy in being not so smart. There was always a longing about the loss, but one affected only by memory. And I wonder what purpose the memories serve in the face of momentary, present joy. Are they relative, required? Or are they the projections of something faded onto a more present joy.
We’re getting married tomorrow, my wife and I, but I can’t help but think back on that girl, her face of pure joy and sadness, the same as this one sitting on my lap, breasts bared, smiling the same smile. I can’t help but think of all the little losses and wonder if some day I’ll be unfortunate enough to count this day among them too.
I wonder what he would say…
I don’t know what to do… Mom told me I should keep a journal, to record my dreams or something. Said I had a talent, said she loved to read what I wrote. I think I believe her. But I don’t know what to write. Some days I just put common things in here. Talk about my day. I don’t really see the point.
Other days though, something happens. Something great or something really bad. Like today. I told her about what happened today, and she told me I should write about it. Like I said, I don’t see what the point is. I don’t see how writing it down so I can read it later, remember what it was that made me feel so bad, is anything but a waste of time. I don’t want to remember feeling this way.
So I’m not going to talk about her. I can’t do it. I can’t. You ever wanted to cry so much that you couldn’t stop yourself? You told yourself you wouldn’t, and you scowled and glared and bit the insides of your cheeks and hated yourself for not being strong enough but GODDAMNIT you were not going to cry, and then you did anyway?
I just want to forget it. I wish it had never happened, that I had never met her. I keep thinking I could have said something different, been a different person, made her like me more. But I couldn’t. And now I’m writing on this stupid page, telling WHO? about things I don’t even want to say. This is beyond stupid, beyond a waste of time. It’s masturbation.
I can’t ever be like this again. I can’t do this to myself again. I hate to cry. What kind of man cries? What would Dad say if he saw me right now? Ya know, he’d just ask me what’s wrong. Listen to me. Chuckle a bit and smile at me and tell me it would all be alright. And man, I would soooo want to believe him.
I wonder if I would be that kind of dad. I wonder what I would say?
Analysis
These are two parts of a very succinct little story. I couldn’t not write it that way. It wouldn’t happen but the way it happened. I even thought about separating them with headers or something for the purpose of the exercise, but then I reread ’em, felt my lower lip tremble a bit, and said, “No, they stay together.” That out of the way, the first part of this came from the standard standoffish aspect I tend to take in my narrative writing. A musing sense of non-involvement that seeps into even my first-person narration.
The second part offered me no such luxury. The second part was about a hurt child, whose memories my first narrator couldn’t even recall. He just couldn’t. I couldn’t either. Writing the first part of the story, I had no idea what the second would be. But once I saw what it was, it made me cry. I think it was probably the familial connection that did it, memories of two background characters who obviously were very important for the little kid that only exists in the moment above. That’s the “write what you know” bit right?
The first scene offers the maudlin brooding of a man with a lot of memories to choose from, to be detached from. The second offers only one, just one. There he is, in the moment, that homonculus of a subconscious reactivated. Makes one wonder how much of that “living in the moment” the first narrator so lauds is actually affected by the tapestry of congruent experience, or if every moment brings its own eternal joys and torments that are everlasting in their tiny little timelines.