Snow is falling. The radar is a just-bloomed bruise stretching backwards from here to Indiana. The precipitation is not the slow and drifting romance of a meandering snowfall, but much faster--almost reading like rain through the window. I can hear the tiny click-click of ice mixed in hitting. A sky of bad reception. This is the kind of snow that falls to build and build fast.
I'm sitting and typing with my coffee, light therapy blaring, and a picture of young me open on the desktop. I am six or seven in the photo--bangs of my Dorothy Hamill haircut in my eyes, scrawny legs jutting from light blue shorts. I am emerging from a kid ride in the amusement park--giant yellow and blue sandbags hang on either side of me. I vaguely remember the maze of heaviness, each one swinging slow and nudging you in different directions. I have just finished saying something, or I'm about to speak, mouth almost open and one small hand poised outward. I'm wearing a white tshirt and a giant plastic necklace. A photo that feels more like a dream now--I was there but I wasn't, remembering but not. It's just me in a moment, not minding the camera, not shying away from it like I would do in five years time.
My next project focuses on kidhood, and I find myself jabbing at it from various directions. Trying to find a way in. Or rather, trying to find a way in that doesn't immediately make me want to leave it. Childhood is tough to write on. I mean really, really write about. I'm impressed with how some writers can talk about the kind of child they were--curious, withdrawn, wild. I'm impressed because I can't really say what I would call myself. Yes, I was curious. Dramatic, but also painfully shy. I had the kind of imagination that saved me and frightened me. And, like everyone I suppose, there are moments which seem nearly irrelevant in recollection but stay stuck in brain's cement. Like kindergarten, when we did a project involving our profiles being traced on paper via shadow. I remember having to sit very still as the light blared to one side and a teacher slowly outlined my face on the wall to my right. I remember the end result, the feeling of despising the outcome, of hating my face without anyone instructing me to. It was the first time I felt a separation between who I felt I was and who I must appear to be. Or a memory of my mother bandaging up one of my skinned knees. The sting of it being cleaned, her breath blowing on the scrape. The immaculate promise of a brand new band-aid. How small of a thing to recollect, yet I'd stay a thousand years in that moment if it meant us never becoming strangers.
I keep the photograph open on my desktop as I write, as a means of staying connected to who it is I am speaking of(or to). Aren't we always those little beings, no matter how many years go by? At times I think of little kid me and want to fall apart. I envy the ease of me in the photo, just a kid caught being a kid. I leave it up as a reminder--that I was in fact that small. In therapy I've often been instructed to talk to myself as I would talk to my child-self. I barely ever get to that dialogue. Just the act of considering it seems to break my heart. I hope this next body of work can push me to get there.
Writing about childhood feels like such an mountain of a task. It feels like I'm trying to write about a fog.
I'm sitting and typing with my coffee, light therapy blaring, and a picture of young me open on the desktop. I am six or seven in the photo--bangs of my Dorothy Hamill haircut in my eyes, scrawny legs jutting from light blue shorts. I am emerging from a kid ride in the amusement park--giant yellow and blue sandbags hang on either side of me. I vaguely remember the maze of heaviness, each one swinging slow and nudging you in different directions. I have just finished saying something, or I'm about to speak, mouth almost open and one small hand poised outward. I'm wearing a white tshirt and a giant plastic necklace. A photo that feels more like a dream now--I was there but I wasn't, remembering but not. It's just me in a moment, not minding the camera, not shying away from it like I would do in five years time.
My next project focuses on kidhood, and I find myself jabbing at it from various directions. Trying to find a way in. Or rather, trying to find a way in that doesn't immediately make me want to leave it. Childhood is tough to write on. I mean really, really write about. I'm impressed with how some writers can talk about the kind of child they were--curious, withdrawn, wild. I'm impressed because I can't really say what I would call myself. Yes, I was curious. Dramatic, but also painfully shy. I had the kind of imagination that saved me and frightened me. And, like everyone I suppose, there are moments which seem nearly irrelevant in recollection but stay stuck in brain's cement. Like kindergarten, when we did a project involving our profiles being traced on paper via shadow. I remember having to sit very still as the light blared to one side and a teacher slowly outlined my face on the wall to my right. I remember the end result, the feeling of despising the outcome, of hating my face without anyone instructing me to. It was the first time I felt a separation between who I felt I was and who I must appear to be. Or a memory of my mother bandaging up one of my skinned knees. The sting of it being cleaned, her breath blowing on the scrape. The immaculate promise of a brand new band-aid. How small of a thing to recollect, yet I'd stay a thousand years in that moment if it meant us never becoming strangers.
I keep the photograph open on my desktop as I write, as a means of staying connected to who it is I am speaking of(or to). Aren't we always those little beings, no matter how many years go by? At times I think of little kid me and want to fall apart. I envy the ease of me in the photo, just a kid caught being a kid. I leave it up as a reminder--that I was in fact that small. In therapy I've often been instructed to talk to myself as I would talk to my child-self. I barely ever get to that dialogue. Just the act of considering it seems to break my heart. I hope this next body of work can push me to get there.
Writing about childhood feels like such an mountain of a task. It feels like I'm trying to write about a fog.
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