Writing for even a hypothetical audience is better for me than journaling privately.
Within 36 hours on my drive with my mother across the country, I took 796 photos. How is it that nature’s palette is always flawless?
For the first 20 years of my conscious life, I was someone with an irrepressible memory. I could tell you what I’d eaten every day the past year for dinner or describe a smudge on the metal plate around the down button of the elevator on the floor where I worked. I still remember a lot, but it’s packed away in cotton. I catch glimpses, but things are fuzzier…and softer. I’m not sure how to write about memorize that are less than engulfing. How do you put the reader there when you’re not there yourself.
This is work I’m doing on recollections of what it was like to be me, as a child:
I was convinced as a five year old that I could fly if I really wanted. If I jumped from the fourth step in just the right way I would rise instead of sinking.
[Just the other night, in a dream, I was sitting cross-legged in the air. I informed someone, “I can levitate.” And wondered if I’d chosen exactly the right word, rather than wondering how I could possibly be so buoyant.]
One morning, having spent the evening at a relative’s house a quarter mile down the road from where we lived, informed my parents I had floated home.
The house belonged to a woman we all called “aunt” although she wasn’t my aunt. It was boring at her house, although my parents tried to teach me to regard the place with wonder. Silver necklaces in wood and glass cabinets, display shelves with unglazed ceramic horses and bulls. Squash blossom, Tang dynasty, proto-Persian I can tell you now. Thriving cactuses in pots on the slate floor of the sun room. Back then these were just plants I couldn’t touch, toys I couldn’t play with.
There was no way that I could have floated home, my parents told me, with amused, insistant smiles. They had carried me. But I was sure. In fact I still almost remember the frictionless movement and the feeling of being curled up on an invisible magic carpet. And they couldn’t really give me a good reason why it wasn’t possible. How can you believe, as a child, what adults tell you about the limitations of the natural world? How can you know, when you haven’t finished testing the laws of logic and gravity?
Zachary, who talks of climbing a tree and jumping into space, agrees with you. At the ago of five he wrote letter to a friend in California, took it to his backyard in Pittsburgh, and flung it in the air to be carried by the wind, airmail.