Burn It Down

The brain has a random little filing system, doesn't it? My early years are all framed by my sister's age. When she started school, I would have been around three. Memories from those years are plentiful and crystal clear. Dick and Jane were always running everywhere chasing after their dog Spot. The color of the bedspread in our room. The floor furnace in the hall. The next door neighbors. Our dog.

After that, there's a few years where everything is blurry and then suddenly it's second grade and my sister's age is no longer pertinent.

Don't worry. This isn't going to be a year by year account of family disfunction. But, for the record, if I ever do decide to drag the crazy train out of the closet, you don't get to be all up on a judgement trip here. You're fucked up too. We all are. Every.Single.One.Of.Us.

Anyway, I had something of an epiphany recently and it kind of pushed me off a cliff. It was after a rough week spent fighting fires at work and swatting cockroaches at home. It was Sunday. Appropriately, Shenandoah's Sunday in the South was on the radio. I was there - in the South - but I was also an entire continent and ocean away. My mind was in Hawaii, on the backroad between Waimea and Honokaa, having a malasada and coffee. Same Jeep. Same song.

It was one of those memories that is so sticky and thick it's tangible.

I pushed Hawaii back for a minute and concentrated being present in the beauty around me. In reality, I was driving along a tree-lined Carolina backroad, windows rolled down. The wind was warm in my hair and drenched with the smell of honeysuckle and wisteria. I noticed the fierce green colors, as if the fields were competing for top billing behind sad little barbed wire fences, wrapped in ivy. Signs advertising Bait and Tackle and Ice Cold Beer were scrawled on boards and tacked to random posts, also wrapped in ivy.

Suddenly, the road curled back on itself, forcing me to slow my roll. On the right, a clearing opened up and a little white farmhouse stared back at me, silent and still against a towering tree line. Without warning, I catapulted off the edge of time. My throat closed. My eyes filled. I clenched my teeth, gripping the wheel with white knuckles. Suspended in that moment, I was free falling through fifty seven years of life.

My life.

When did I stop living it? When did I let it go, allowing it to spool away from me; a kite on an ever lengthening string?

Shit. It's mostly over.

Now, that hurt. That fucking hurt.

I hit bottom and in a flash, was consumed in a raging fire of emotion.

Every feeling I have ever felt, everything good-everything bad-all the pain and all the joy. Everything.

It was a bonfire of memories.

They say when you die your life passes before your eyes. I always wondered how that would work. Like, math it out - there's no way for that to happen. Maybe if you just hit the highlights. But who picks the playlist?

Here's the answer: It's not linear.

Life is not linear.

We are not linear.

Time is a construct of man, with a beginning a middle and an end, created to help us file things away to be referenced later, whether by age or event or what song was playing on the radio.

All I know is in that split second I was three and Kathy had just come home from school. She was teaching me to read and we were squeezed in the space between the bed and the wall, legs curled in a pretzel and I was also seven and asking my dad for a horse and he was explaining budgets being such a weirdo with his horn-rimmed glasses but I loved him anyway and he was so handsome and as I stood beside him in the truck, the dusty summer heat beaming in, I was sure I would marry him when I grew up. I was fifteen and the house was empty and I was scared and thirty, watching my kids in the yard, filled with an impossibly huge love and equally huge trepidation and forty and fifty and fifty seven.

We are every age and every iteration of ourselves past and future. In that sense, we are ageless. We are eternal.

So yeah. That happened.

I stopped driving when the road ended abruptly - at a lake, ironically. I sat there and watched the water undulate. It was a lake but I heard the ocean.

It's been a couple of weeks. The fire is under control now. But I'm aware of it smoldering just beneath the surface. I haven't figured out what it means, I just know that I miss me. I miss laughing. I miss being happy. I miss my life. And while this is not exactly a declaration of independence, it's definitely a realization that something isn't right. And damn it, if I'm not going to live my life while I'm actually in it, I might as well burn it down and watch the cockroaches run.