Blue carpet, pink blinds. An out of tune piano with numbers drawn onto the keys, egg carton on top for storing shells, coins, marbles. Sheepskin rug (you know the one), patchwork quilt thrown over the bed. No dates and heights etched into the doorframe, but on the door: a wooden ‘R’ painted in a polka dot pattern. In the bathroom next to my room, the ceiling cracking open, the bushy body of a possum appearing in the gap. But this memory isn’t real, it’s borrowed, from a story or a dream thought of with too much conviction.
I’ve been napping with the lights on at 15-minute intervals, never crossing the threshold of the light outside turning dim through sleep. It’s a technique to stall the panic, staying close to the feeling of time passing normally, avoiding the disorienting portal of missing dinner and waking, somehow, in the past.
The books I’ve been reading say the way out is giving into ‘it’. To whom? To what? ‘It’ has legs, and your own face, ‘the external figure [echoing] the internal figure: ‘ah so it’s true, I exist.’’, from Lispector. Kierkegaard says ‘it’ is the despair: ‘at every actual instant of despair the despairer bears as his responsibility all the foregoing experience in possibility as a present’. ‘You don’t have to go through it, you can go around’, says a self-help book from the 60’s. This is news to me, that there’s no greater reward for suffering more when you end up on the other side anyway. I want to choose to not face the peak. I want to choose to not suffer of my own volition, maybe. For now though I’ve dug a hollow, a different route. Going under, inching this way and that, moving closer towards nothing but my own undoing. But let me trail off, because I have no excuses, only an adoration for the distractions.
A Christmas tree in the front yard. A small thing, more branch than root, better for it that it didn’t reach some greatness to mourn when the new owners moved in, ripping it out (branch and root), extending the cement driveway over it. Like Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell. My class was assigned to sing it at the school concert one year, and here’s another memory: me as someone’s old man, fading into the night through the sliding door.
The dogs bare their teeth at each other more often now. Sometimes, the other’s ear in the mouth, never biting but chattering, a growl in the throat, saying, I love you, but. They tug at the one toy though there are two; dig their noses under the same blanket; rip apart the same treat. I too haven’t yet learned there is enough to go around, and so I cannot let anything go. My new egg carton, remembering, remembering. I learned once that when you thought of a memory you were really thinking about the last time you thought of it, and not the memory itself. So, I couldn’t tell you how I spent my days last year.
The house was at the end of a downhill 3-way junction, the split end of the T. Mum would worry of a car ripping down in a state too human, and mistaking the glowing of their headlights against the road-end sign for the warm end of a long tunnel. They’d tear through the Christmas tree, through the study, through the loungeroom, lodging the front bumper brutally into the heart of the home and the heart of one of us. It never happened, it happened all the time. We woke to a thud, a dent on the sign. Metal being scraped along the ground in the darkness.
The self-help book says that following a period of high emotional distress, people find themselves unable to make even simple decisions. Everything is a slight, everything an injustice. There are ideas at the tip of the pen but I am too bored by myself to lift my hand. Brilliance lies elsewhere, greatness trails another’s feet, let me linger here. But then hope, and then praise, and then the feeling of standing at the edge of the road and realising the future doesn’t ask of me to make pitstops in the past. It doesn’t require me deciphering the mechanics of former simplicity; of the particular way I was unrattled by what tortures me now. There’s nothing to undo, there’s nothing to uncover. And yet,
I feigned sickness to skip school, maybe, that is the impression my memory of my mother’s words leave me. Halloween, I didn’t know. The kids knocked on our door at night. I wanted blue face paint and a tattered dress and a plastic pumpkin tub full of cheap lollies I didn’t particularly like. I went through mum’s makeup after, smeared blue eyeshadow along my eyelids with a finger. Or maybe, I did it before. Then I went to my room and wrote.
Selin, from Elif Batuman’s The Idiot: ‘It can be really exasperating to look back at your past. What’s the matter with you? I want to ask her, my younger self, shaking her shoulder. If I did that, she would probably cry. Maybe I would cry, too.’ I can’t see her yet, the version of me who shakes the shoulder and is not the one being shaken. My therapist says to get there, I have to stop willing this version of me away. That I cannot build myself from nothing, from no one. I’ll wake from a nap, the lights off, darkness outside. Have years passed? Is it over? I know when it is, there will be no thought to ask.
We lived in another house, too. It had a pool, filled with algae, never used. There’s no memories there worth remembering, I can’t even recall the feeling of when we left.