Memories

I have forgotten already so much of my life; memories like wax figures in the sun begin to lose their shape and coherence before disappearing completely. I grasp at them, sometimes desperately; details drift away into the aether. Despite this, I am perpetually nostalgic. The details, I have discovered, are secondary in importance to the feelings those memories can call back up from the depths of my chest, though they are not necessarily happy ones. I remember the first date that I went on with my girlfriend of four years. I remember the last words I said to my grandmother as she lay on her deathbed, slowly starving. I remember the feeling of the sun on my face. I remember birthday cakes decorated with toy trucks. I remember the texture of thick carpet between my toes. I remember the smell of the halls in my elementary school. I remember a darkened basement and pedaling in circles and children laughing.

I remember the humility and astonishment I felt while standing at the very edge of oblivion; beneath a night sky so vast and containing so many points of light that I was unable to blink, unable to move for fear of disappearing into it completely. I am born of Ohio but was, for the most part, raised in the countryside of New Jersey. Even amongst the rural landscapes of my childhood, the light of nearby New York City drenched the horizon in a perpetual orange glow that washed out all but the most stubborn stars. The window of the room in which I live today stands opposite a street lamp whose incandescent light buzzes persistently through the cracks of cheap venetian blinds left always down. And yet, I can still remember lying on a blue tarp stretched across desert sand; surrounded on all sides by the bodies of my sleeping companions. We had rolled into the campground (or was it a ghost town? Or a theme park?) in the middle of the night. We were unshowered and immensely tired. We had spent hours in cramped vans traversing the great wasteland of the American Southwest. There were twenty of us, united for a month of outdoor adventuring. We decided, out of an eagerness to get to sleep as quickly as possible and because the night air was so warm, to forgo tents and sleep on our mats alone, without shelter. This memory has a feeling attached to it; a feeling of contentedness and wonderment and sleep falling over me. I slept under nothing but a blanket of stars that night, the desert air still and silent. In my mind, my eyes never close, and I lie beneath as much universe as I have ever seen for a night that lasts forever.

I remember another night. I remember driving aimlessly around in the rain in Jacob's Mustang, my face misted with rain blown through the window cracked by Dane, smoking. I remember Jacob at the wheel and Dane shotgun. But who was beside me in the back? The details are, again, elusive. But the smell of the car mingling with that of cigarettes, teenage boys, and rain-soaked countryside is unmistakable. The car was a 1968 Ford Mustang with a 286 cubic inch V8 engine. It rumbled and shook at idle. It smelled of unburned gasoline, lead additives, and leather decades old. The rain came down in sheets against the windshield and we rumbled on. I remember discussing sex and love and death; those important things that are really deserving of conversation. And I remember not discussing anything at all; bathed in the pale green light from the dashboard lost in our own thoughts, our own memories. In the years since, we have all gone on to other places, other nights, and other cars. I doubt that the Mustang even runs anymore. But, in my mind, the ride never ends, the rain never stops, and we never go home again.  

I remember another ride, too. This one taken years before. My family and I headed south on I-71 one night on our way home, the radio off, not a word spoken between any of us. We had been in Mansfield for another Christmas Eve with the grandparents and the cousins. My father, as was his custom when around his family, had consumed a good deal of scotch and had gotten very drunk. Gifts had been exchanged and it had been a happy occasion, at least for me and my brothers. I remember my father flexing his bad leg against the windshield of the Suburban and the creak of the strained glass. I remember my mother commanding him to get his foot off of it for fear that it would break. I remember him explaining the pain he was in. I remember shouting. I remember the cracks spreading across the windshield slowly, until it gave way in a spectacular crash. I learned that automotive glass does not shatter; it retains its shape even under enormous strain. I remember my mother screaming, my father yelling, my brothers crying. Blows were exchanged between mother and father; a domestic dispute at 75 miles per hour. I remember sitting in the back of the truck, my head pressed deep into the upholstery of the rear seat, wishing that I were somewhere else. In the years since, we have all gone off to other places. We all got away; New Jersey for some of us, sobriety for others. But I think we are all still in that car on Christmas Eve. The glass is still breaking. And I wish more than anything that I were somewhere else.