Memory Elision

 
I’ve contemplated death since the age of four. I remember the year of inception only because I spent the hours of my fearful occupation with mortality beneath a birch tree in the front yard of a house my family lived in but a year. We changed residences often back then. Nothing seemed permanent to me.

(Every relationship of mine has ended in abandonment. Perhaps they all do. In time–slow may be its passage–people allow you less of themselves, of touch, word and emotion. Deprivation unto detachment.

My father, on the other hand, just disappeared
one day, left no clue as to where he absconded.
I felt that loss unlike every other: I did not weep.
I’m certain he’s found happiness . . . )

(I know however that memory remains ever fallible. All the love, nurture, and affection; the pain, cruelty, and silence could be mere imagination, the creative ends of self-pity meshed into desire. So, when I reach that penultimate moment of my existence, will the accounting of all my travails then be truer? more real than experience itself
ever was?)

At that tender age I convinced myself that I’d one day invent a machine or a medicine that would extend my life forever. What now lacks clarity is the knowledge of whether I believed that it was me
            or the world
                        that would end up
dying.