The Nature Of Things in anticlimatic

Childhood felt like a box, in hindsight. Just sort of placed in this small area with the fence of my parents gaze and grab to keep me in it. Often the box moved places– my uncle’s low rickety lean-to with the old coke machine in it and the tennis court overgrown with grass, or a small bend on the side of a narrow road where a creek ran underneath it through a large cement pipe. Sometimes in waiting rooms. Sometimes in church pews. A larger than average portion was spent in my parents living room, of course, in front of the TV.

I remember these moments for some silly reason- super early in the morning, when my brain was just coming on- and also super late at night, as it was shutting down. Something about the nearness to dreaming put those fevered moments in my memory. It’s a fever I yet feel today, whenever I’ve been up hours later than I should. It blurs the boxes. I remember watching an episode of Three’s Company in all its yellow splendor in the pre-dawn dark.

It’s been coming to me lately I think as a means to preserve the memory of my father, as those were hours we shared together in the long distant early days of my existence. There’s a new normal of him not being around, which I celebrate as a good and necessary thing to aid in the waning of grief- but the “old” normal yet lives in my memory as a thing complete and real and maddeningly adjacent to this “new” normal in which I find myself imprisoned. I am oft accused of being melancholy, but how could such a brilliant and temporary world be anything else but achingly sad?