Where is the child I was,
Still inside me or gone?
Does he know that I never loved him
and that he never loved me?
Why did we spend so much time
growing up only to separate?
Why did we both not die
when my childhood died?
And why does my skeleton pursue me
if my soul has fallen away?
- Pablo Neruda, “XLIV Book of Questions”
It’s like I blinked and suddenly a decade passed.
I am 32 and when I stand out of bed my feet ache. I curl my toes and crack them against the carpeted floor. I extend them, I stretch. My ankles crack, my knees pop. My left shoulder feels out of place, almost numb, then heavy. A physical therapist told me I should stop sleeping on that side, the numbness is a pinched nerve.
My daughter is crying in the next room. She just turned 2, two days before my 32nd birthday. It was yesterday I was waking up at 10, limber, rushing to the gym before my closing shift at the bookstore. It was a good routine, a structure to my days that revolved around myself. My daughter asks for Bluey, as she comes into our bed. It’s 6 am, and 10 years ago I was waking up at 10 to go the gym before my closing shift at the bookstore.
When Did Everything Change?
It’s been a week since I turned 32. For my birthday my parents gave me gardening tools; my wife gave me a toolbox. These were good gifts. In the mail I received one card, and 3 bills. Just yesterday I was celebrating my birthday at Six Flags with 6 of my closest friends. I had a season pass, and me and Will would make the drive 6 times in one summer as we arranged our off days. The last time I went to Six Flags was to chaperone an 8th grade field trip, over a year ago.
I can understand aging. I can understand my joints stiffening, my shoulder aching, having to stretch before doing any somewhat strenuous activity. But what still baffles me is when it changed.
Wasn’t it just yesterday that we each bought our own pizzas from Little Caesar’s for $5 each, and ate them on Austin’s front steps, before promptly playing another game of 21. Last time I ate Little Caesar’s I was sick for 3 days, and that was 10 years ago.
I’ve known my wife for almost 8 years now. Sometimes it feels like a lifetime, sometimes it feels like just the other day. We look at pictures of us when we met, and what feels like days ago, looks like ages as we count our newfound wrinkles, our white hairs. I asked her to grow old with me, and all along we’ve grown old.
The Persistence of Memory
Even as I started the literary magazine with Christina, Dali’s Lovechild, inspired by Dali’s surrealism, I don’t think I understood his famous painting.
Time melts. It distorts. Overtime, memory loses its place. It was just yesterday we started that website, arguing, laughing, as we read through countless submissions. I wanted to make branded mugs, she wanted an intern to do the reading. Memory persists because time is a construct that is only as present as the memory itself. Time only passes as memories are forgotten, or brushed aside, or repressed. It doesn’t matter that we closed up 8 years ago as we both entered graduate school and could no longer keep up with the work required to keep us going. Each time I remember a particular story, or joke we told, the memory comes back to life, it happened only yesterday.
Memory as Purgatory
As many other teachers likely feel, I feel trapped in my memories of school. Oftentimes I’ll tell my students stories of my experiences in school: times I wasn’t a good student, or times I made mistakes, or times with friends, always a cautionary tale, like the time I didn’t lock my gym locker and came back from P.E with all my things stolen as I finished my day in short shorts. It happened just yesterday. I was in 7th grade.
I once had a dream that the bus dropped me off at my high school, I walked with the crowd inside to find the doors locked behind us. All the familiar faces around me were strange, where mouths should be were instead blurs of flat face. Where classrooms should’ve been were more bare walls. Like blinded sheep we orbited the school, up and down the stairs, back and forth through the halls. In the dream I knew this would be forever. I would never escape high school, I was in a purgatory that even should I ever make it out, I would never truly leave. It didn’t matter that as I dreamt this I had already graduated from college, it became real again. It was just yesterday I was trapped in those walls.
There are countless times teaching middle school I am reminded of my own childhood. There are students I see myself in. I want to protect them and warn them, “They’re not laughing with you, I’m sorry.”
I remember when I realized the difference in laughs. The full body laughter of a genuine friend. I retroactively reanalyzed the stilted laughter I’d elicited countless times being the “class clown.”
When Did I Change?
Like many I check the memories tab on Facebook. I’ve had a Facebook since 2008. Every thing I’ve said has been remembered. I’m only grateful there is no longer a connection to Myspace. I cringe at some of the things I’ve said in the past. How often I posted, how meaningless, trivial, and sometimes offensive the things I said were. The other day I told Rebecca that I often look back at my old posts, and remember who I was at that time, and wish I could smack myself in the face. I think at each point of my life I’d look back just a few years before and go, “Ugh, I can’t believe I was like that. I wish I could smack some sense into myself.”
What does it say about me that even at 32 I look back at me at 30 and think, “Ugh, what a naive fool!”
When did I change?
When did I stop saying blatantly insensitive things? When did I start recoiling when I hear people say the R word? When did I stop wanting to make people laugh, at any cost necessary? In fact, when did I start being vulnerable? When did I start opening up more widely? When did I stop playing the fool? It was yesterday when Mrs. Young accidentally broke the globe in half and I rushed to grab one half, place it on my head and run around the room yelling, “Look at me, I’m traveling the globe!”
14 Forever
In my Language Arts class this week we read the story “Eleven” by Sandra Cisneros Watson. In the story, a girl is turning 11, but realizes that just because she is turning 11 doesn’t mean that she is no longer 10, or 9, or 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, or 1.
That’s what it feels like.
I’m 32, but when I started at this new school I was 14 again. I was the new kid in middle school who didn’t know where to sit. I walked in to the library, the staff arrayed around the room at the tables, sitting in groups. I was nervous as I considered my possibilities. I knew nobody, save for the few teachers who had been in my interviews. Everyone else seemed to have a spot. I found an empty seat in the back, and sat waiting for my nerves to settle back down. Waiting for my age to slowly creep back up to 32.
I met Rebecca just yesterday, after talking for a few weeks on a dating app. I walked slowly towards her in a Chicago Barnes and Noble, she browsed through books, pretending not to be nervous, I shakily called her name as I walked towards her, “Rebecca..” if she looked and smiled I knew I’d be safe, if she ignored me, maybe my eyesight had failed me and it wasn’t her. If she recoiled at the disheveled sight of me we could part ways with minimal damage. But she turned, she smiled, and laughed as she said, “Bryan…” I was 24, I’m still 24.
In this way, memory is a time machine. In this way, despite the changes, the white hairs, the creaking bones, I am still 24.
I am 32 and my feet ache in the morning. I am 15 and pigging out on cheap pizza before running in the rain. I am 14 and scared of first impressions. I am 22 and so close to my goal weight, I walk past the donuts in the break room. I am 17 and getting pulled over the day I bought my first car. I am 30 and holding my newborn baby in my arms, near tears, disbelieving how could they possibly give a baby to just a kid, like me.
I have changed, and I ask myself, where did this come from? When did I become someone who cries at mushy scenes in Boy Meets World? When did I become someone who, without irony, tells students again and again, “Don’t forget to write this in your assignment notebook!”?
I have changed. I am 32, but I am also 31. I am 30 holding my daughter for the first time. I am 29, 28. I am 27 and struggling to find just the right spot by the lake and Navy Pier to propose to Rebecca as I hastily hand her the ring in the box and blurt out, “Marry me?” I am 26, I am 25, I am 24 and falling in love while Rebecca and I race from illuminated tree to the next seeing who can press the buttons quicker. I am 23, and 22 in my own world centered around myself, my gym, and my job. I am 21 and losing my taste for late night parties. I am 20, 19, 18 buying my first lottery ticket and realizing, maybe 18 isn’t what it was cracked up to be. I am 17, 16, 15, 14 sitting at the wrong table on the first day of school. I am 13, 12 and my grandfather is dying in his bed as he tries to sing “Good mornin, good mornin,” as I walk in to say goodbye. I am 11, 10, 9, and I am 8, 7, and 6, and even to this day I am still 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1. I have changed. I am 32. But even as I have changed I still contain all my mistakes, all my memories, I am an accumulation of my years.
This was profound in its simplicity and its vulnerability. Thank you for writing.