This Is Us
Notes on a childhood memory
My earliest memory, and thus the beginning of my selfhood, has absence at its heart. I don’t remember much about knocking out my front tooth. By that I mean I have an incomplete, fragmentary recollection of what happened Before and what happened After. I remember sliding around the kitchen floor in my socks. Getting a bit of momentum, sliding toward the stairs at the back landing, then turning around and doing the same in the opposite direction. My mother was in the kitchen, too, moving between the sink and the stove. My sister was sliding with me, sometimes in front…
The trucks rolled up shortly before 9, the rising sun slowly pulling the chill of night-rain from the damp earth. The crew made their way into the neighbor’s backyard and by 10 one brave climber was digging spurs into bark. The gas-powered thieving had a strange elegance to it, slow and strategic limbing all the way up, the most unwieldy branches hastily knotted and threaded to the ground, the process moving higher and higher, then a climactic reversal of direction as sections from the top half of the now bare trunk were lopped off to fall in huge concussive blasts…
A brief afternoon shower, not even enough to cool the air, and after it passes Spenser is struck by the way the summer light clings to everything. As if some cloudborne tide had washed over the earth, and in receding, stirred up primal brightness and life, spangling every treetop and rockface and rooftop in a slimy glaze. Pavement, lamp posts, windows— all cast in an unnameable sheen of purple and orange. It’s impossible to imagine a colour that nature can’t produce. The air itself is infused as the sun sinks low, flaring hard.
The air is warm and sticky with…
I awoke last Sunday with a heaviness in my chest. This is not a metaphor. My first conscious sensation was of a subtle yet undeniable weight right where I imagine my heart to be. The sensation was difficult to articulate. Not quite a tightness or pinching, nothing, in fact, that I would describe as in any way painful. This was . . . …
Perhaps awareness of one’s mortality is the first spark of self-loathing
As a child I feared you, fear as cold and hard as a stone from the river. I imagined your frailty as something monstrous, something otherworldly. All rotten gums and cavernous wrinkles, you were ruin and disaster, the vandal from the gloomy future come to slowly leech my essence, the horrible witch already haunting the bright red alleys of my young body.
I saw you on your deathbed. The bed was always white as mountain snow and I was always somehow looking down on you — myself — from above. …
Longshadows in the slow fade of a late summer afternoon. Tristan’s body in the dirt. Memories. Brainshapes. Apparitions.
They awake together, bleary eyes meeting across the space between their beds as the window begins to glow. Stretching. Blinking. No words. Old bones of the house beginning to flex and creak as they warm in the sun’s rise. …
I know the call by heart. I’ve known it for almost as long as I can remember.
Little roller up along first. Behind the bag, it gets through Buckner! Here comes Knight, and the Mets win it!
I know these words and I can hear them in my head in the honeyed, steady cadence of Vin Scully. Long before I ever came to know who Vin Scully was, the words have been there.
Little roller up along first. Behind the bag, it gets through Buckner! Here comes Knight, and the Mets win it!
For some, the story is a tragic…
The sounds. It’s all sounds when you begin. Once you make the decision to start looking for birds, it’s your ears that actually tune in first. Everywhere you go, the air seems to drip with honeyed trills and cascading warbles. It’s overwhelming, once you start to really listen. …
A lifetime of books made me who I am, for better or worse
The day before they left, my wife and I found a brief, quiet moment to share an embrace in the kitchen. I told her how much I would miss her and miss the kids, how sorry I was that my work schedule meant I couldn’t accompany them on their spring break vacation, how lonely I would be without them around. Ten days. Ten long days. What would I do with myself? My wife said, “You’ll be fine. You’ll be happy being alone. Alone with your thoughts.”
I didn’t respond. I didn’t try to counter what she was saying or feign…
My dream journal was meant to record and observe, but it’s not that simple
You’ve been lost to me for so long. Where are you and where are you going? Lately, I’ve become obsessed with the space between us, with our profound unfamiliarity. A life together, and yet I hardly know you. Who are you? What do you think about in the dark when I’m not around?
I want to set things right. Unless I seek you out, track you, hunt you, observe, record, and document, your existence will pass into oblivion. It will be as though you never were. Lately, the prospect of you vanishing frightens me for reasons I can’t explain. If…
Gavin Paul
English Professor. Author of "Conspiracy of One," a small book of short stories, and “The Coward," a collection of essays. amazon.com/author/gavinpaul
