A Half-Empty Life

I've decided to experiment with writing an autobiography. I know I'm only twenty-one but you've got to start somewhere. Please read and let me know what you think!

It’s midnight in September, thirteen minutes past to be precise, and it’s the wrong time to begin a story. It’s cold outside, only just getting cold for the year, and my windows are open. I’m tired. I am waiting for a phone call. Somehow, though, I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep if I don’t begin.

            It’s been on my mind a lot lately. Everything, I mean. My life. My short story. Can I call it history without sounding pretentious?

            Today I was driving home from a friend’s house and listening to a song that I’ve listened to dozens, if not hundreds of times, and I found myself very nearly crying. This happens sometimes; the strangest things will lay me low. Convoluted psychological triggers or the simplest comment at the wrong time, whatever the case may be, but sometimes I just break emotionally.

            A very good friend of mine says it’s because of my mother. Sounds very Freudian, right? She says that I literally don’t know how to feel. I know intellectually that on a breezy autumn morning, driving in the sun, a little bit of money in my pocket and nothing but pleasant times ahead, I should be smiling. I should at least be content.

            But that lyric comes on and there are tears in my eyes. I’m struggling to breathe a little. A wave of sadness wells up from nowhere and all the old thoughts come to the surface, rested and ready.

            I think about the blue house in Coventry. The woods where I spent a great deal of my time, buried a bunch of my pets.

            I think about Zachary. It’s been nearly eleven years. I can’t believe that.

            I think about my living brother, my sisters, how far away they are, how distant they were when we were together.

            I think about the divorce. I never figured divorce was such a big deal. Never figured it could hurt me, at sixteen.

            My father, who at twenty-one I still can’t decide how to feel about, which seems strange.

            My mother. What can I say here? If I start talking about her, I won’t stop. Best to save that for when I’m ready, and I’m not in a rush.

            A knock at the door, it’s late, turn that computer off. I hear you typing. Shut it off.

            I am.

            No, I hear you typing.

            Well I am typing, now, but the computer will be off.      

            My grandmother. Surrogate mother, which is to say she’s most assuredly taken my mother’s place in my life as ‘lead female antagonist’. More on that later, of course.

            She’s right, though. It’s late, and it’s cold, and I’m keeping people waiting. But I do feel better, having started. I’ll get us up-to-date.

            One thing at a time.

 

-September 18, 2009. 12:34 A.M.

 

            I think my earliest memory is of my father feeding me to a mechanical dinosaur. It’s the clearest image from a span of several years.

            My family was much smaller then, but we were all together so in a way it seemed much larger. I was probably six, which means my mother was a geriatric twenty-seven. Dad was twenty-six. Perhaps that’s why he thought it was funny. I really don’t expect to grow out of my puerile sense of humor in the next five years, so why would he?

            We were at some kind of dinosaur exhibit. I was at that excellent age where every young boy is absolutely obsessed with dinosaurs, particularly the giant predators. I read something where a psychologist said that little boys are thrilled by dinosaurs because they represent something even more powerful, even bigger, and even older than our mighty, invincible fathers. Interesting idea, although I don’t think my line of reasoning was quite so convoluted at that age.

            More likely, I was just excited by big, loud, ugly things. Enter the Tyrannosaurus Rex.

            T. Rex is considered the largest land predator to have ever existed. Twenty feet tall, five to seven tons, teeth like steel bananas. And peculiar little arms. The T. Rex at this particular exhibit was to scale, towering over the crowd on motionless legs, where the motors and wiring came up from its base to move the massive, growling head and work the toothy jaws.

            The T. Rex would sway back and forth, wobbling at the end of each moment from inertia. Loud hydraulic hisses would accompany each motion, poorly hidden by a composite-sounding growl from concealed speakers at the monster’s feet. Mist machines kept everything damp and slightly more convincing. Even to my six-year-old mind, it was all clearly fake. Even a little boring.

            I was walking next to Dad, looking up at the mechanical T. Rex, when suddenly I felt myself being lifted up into the air. I felt happy, the simple kind of happy a child feels when his dad picks him up to show him something, a deep-seated, instinctive sense of safety-

            -and was horrified when, instead of being deposited on my father’s shoulders as expected, I was lifted towards the maw of the Tyrannosaurus as it swung over towards us, rubbery shovel-sized jaw hinging open to greet me.

            “It’s gonna EAT you!” Dad laughed, probably expecting me to get that it was a joke.

            I knew it was fake. That’s the part that confuses me now. Why did I recoil in terror? Why did I kick my dad repeatedly, trying to climb down his arms, trying to escape the immobile dinosaur?

            I cried for a few minutes, hiding my face in my father’s thigh, embarassed to be so upset in front of people. That instinct would come up many times in my future; I have a tendency to look for comfort from the people who are hurting me.

            I know it was a joke. He was only teasing. I knew that as a child.

            But something stuck with me, something important enough that it’s my first, clearest memory; it didn’t matter that I was essentially safe. It didn’t matter that the monster was a poor rubber fake, or that Dad was clearly just trying to get a rise out of me. What I remember is the feeling of being safe, of being held by a parent, of being carried and protected… and that feeling being blown apart by my young father’s idea of a joke.

            I would spend my life craving that feeling, and never completely trusting it again.

 

-         September 22, 2009 10:38 P.M.

 

      It’s astounding, the way music can just take whatever state of mind you’re in and blast it aside, replace it with the emotion and the wisdom of the song. I didn’t really set out to write a story about music, of course, but every time I think about it, music plays a strangely pivotal role in my life.

      Strange because I’m no musician. Oh, if you can get me comfortable enough or drunk enough, I’ll sing, and by all accounts I’m fairly good at it, but in general my talent for music extends only to downloading it.

      Right now, I’ve just watched the trailer for Where the Wild Things Are, a movie based on the book by Maurice Sendak. It’s a children’s story, really just a set of charming illustrations with a very basic storyline to tie them together. The song playing over this trailer is called Wake Up, by a band called The Arcade Fire. I have never listened to this band before. I resolve to do so, starting tonight.

      Anyway.

      Excellent song. I decided to look up the lyrics, listen to the full song, rather than the chopped up trailer version, and below the lyric sheet someone made a very interesting comment. It was anonymously posted, but what this person said was, “This song describes the way an unfeeling person can finally break that shell and feel again, even after years, and the way their new emotions can be that much more powerful for having been neglected.”

      I read these words and a surge passes through me, a physical sense of… potential? Something struggling to escape, as strange as it sounds. Neglected senses of emotion, detecting a way out at last.

      I can’t be an unfeeling person, can I?

      I pride myself on an unerringly accurate sense of empathy, the ability to discern the feelings and state of others. This allows me to both comfort and manipulate, two things I learned from my mother at different stages in my life.

      If  I can feel for others, it only makes sense that I can feel for myself.

      Yet at various times, this odd sensation has come over me, followed immediately by a great sense of loss, as though I am missing something and I’ll never know it again. The way I feel sometimes about old friends, old lovers, certain relatives. I don’t need them to survive… but where are they? What would life be like if they were still here?

      What if these profound emotions that people write songs about are beyond me? What part of me is missing, or damaged, so that real emotion only comes in occasional overpowering spasms?

      I love, but it’s a gentle, easy love. Only occasionally the fierce, burning, desperate LOVE that makes me want to cry with the joy of ever knowing her, when I fantasize about building a life together and smile, when we have just made love and it’s one of those rare times when she holds me instead of me holding her, and I get to be the small spoon and feel protected and warm and safe.        

      I hate, but it’s an idealogical, calculated disgust more than real HATE. Very rarely do I feel anything. Usually I just rationalize why a person should be hated, back it up with evidence, and consider them hated.

      But feel it? With passion?

      I do. Occasionally. When just the right combination of words and notes and circumstances comes along.

      I’m sorry, I was talking about music or something. This happens to me all the time. I catch the breeze of something I meant to get around to saying, and next thing you know we’ve spent a page or two discussing my secret emotional handicap.

      I want to tell you about music. I want to tell you about the Hanson song I didn’t play at my brother’s funeral, because a good friend of mine was there and Hanson looked like girls back then and I would have been embarassed, and so when we got home I stayed out in the car with the tape player and listened to it myself, over and over, praying to Zachary and apologizing over and over to him for being scared of what someone might think of my musical tastes. And every time Taylor sang, “Please don’t cry,” it became harder and harder. I think it was the fourth time through that I couldn’t cry at all. And before too long, the song meant nothing to me anymore, and I could pretend I didn’t regret not playing it, I could pretend it would have been tacky and in no way meaningful, I could pretend I didn’t like Hanson because they’re girly.

      That’s the story I meant to write tonight. I was going to go into a lot of detail. I was going to talk at length about my brother Zachary, about the way an infant looks so wrong in a suit, in a coffin, in the ground. I meant to describe the few days he ever came home, instead of being wired to the walls in the children’s hospital, when we’d give him a bath and try to ignore his coughing.

      I wanted to devote pages to his eyes. His eyes like diamonds, bright and clear, blue with shining flecks, heart-stopping to look into.

      Which, incidentally, is one of the symptoms typical of children born with his disease. I didn’t know that back then. I just knew he was beautiful, that he was my brother, that he died and there was nothing anyone could have done.

      Time and experience and research and cruel revelations would prove me wrong on most of these counts, but he will always be beautiful. Go to Coventry, Connecticut, to st. Mary’s cemetary across the street from the baseball field, and find a black stone where it says “WILLSON”, and you’ll see. His face is etched into the marble.

      That’s the story I was going to write down, tonight. It had something to do with music, when I started, but you know how easy it is to get distracted. One thing just leads to another.

 

- October 5, 2009 10:08 PM