I bet you are yummy.
I would like to fall forward into the screen, rending the barriers between times and spaces. I would like to come to rest here, face upward at clouds that hint at the possibility of distant rain, of water I can lick off of petals heavy with potential, laden with purpose. When I die, this is a part of where I will go.
Tonight my brother is at a thirteenth birthday party for an old friend with whom he was very close in elementary school, who has since become more of an aquaintance. Despite this separation, the boy invited only three kids to his birthday party--those three who formed the nucleus of his childhood friends, and thus his childhood itself. This idea struck me as so nakedly honest, so admirable; to admit openly the bonds that certain friends have looped around your wrists, unbreakable over time or distance. I entertained for a moment the possibility of hosting a party like that myself, when my seventeenth rolls around in the harvest days of August. I thought for a moment of our limbs all entangled in the hammock in my backyard, sticky with sugar water and our hair long and uncombed. Reality eventually seeped back into this lovely tableaux, summoning heavy rainclouds to drive us screaming back inside the (blue and white) house. Those friends to whom I pledged my life and love eternal in elementary school are so different now, so desperately disparate that any scenario in which they all sit at the same table is completely unfeasible. There are seeds of social suspicion, the eternal mistrust of one clique for the other, sown so deeply between some of us now that even a passing hello is beyond any sort of reality. For those with whom I am still in friendly contact, I am deeply grateful for your presence in my life. But I think the truth is, my childhood ended a long time ago--that most of ours ended long before we were ready to leave the treehouse and lay down our wooden swords--so we cling to whatever nostalgic vestiges are left to us. (Remember when--? Remember--?) I admire my brother's friend for sending off his pre-teen years as one would send off a proud Viking king: ablaze in his funeral pyre, heading out toward open water with all of his earthly wealth around him. And now I send my childhood off as well, though not with a bang, but a whimper (har har).
It's finally time to give up Neverland. I've always been afraid to let go, because there is no adult dream of magic, no big girl version of the fantasy of distant lands sown with wild adventures, or of being some powerful mage on whose coltish shoulders rides the fate of the world. But I think...I think I can grasp at something more visceral, if not closer to my heart...like the Narnia born during the Last Battle when the old Narnia was destroyed; truer, purer, akin to the heart of everything, of Eliot's light and silence. I have not given up searching for magic, but I can abandon the childish suspicion of all things Grown Up. Because if nothing else, it was one of those books of my childhood (all of which ring truer to me today than any classic of modern literature) that taught me that it was grown up love that ultimately saved the world.
I could smell the snow obliterating all other scents of winternight when I stepped out of the car and stood on my front step this evening. I think I'll sit up a moment longer, to watch the world obscure itself like an old photograph, white interference scrubbing me out from your collective consciousness.
Look at everything as though it were for the first time.