The Story of My Life
I had to do a creative non-fiction piece for one of my classes. Then I figured I might as well put it up here, see if anyone has any opinions on it (they would be greatly appreciated).
I am a Jellyfish
The conclusion has been reached that I am strange, even for a writer. Because writers are strange in general.
I think I simply spend too much time in my own head. I never stop thinking. There are no moments of silence where my brain does not question one thing or another. The things it thinks are often nonsense. Do leaves know how short their lives are? Do the books that sit on library shelves and are never checked out feel inadequate?
Jellyfish know the secrets of the universe.
I decided this while standing on the dock of a California beach in late July, after my senior year of high school. I had spent the month and a half previously taking classes at Dixie State through a program for low-income, first generation college students that I had been involved in for two years. It was our final trip, to celebrate getting through seven weeks of intense work.
Thousands of miles away, in Brigham City, Utah, it is the day of my grandfather’s funeral.
He had died a few days previously. They were playing “Walking on Sunshine” when my mother called and told me. It wasn’t entirely unexpected; he’d had three heart surgeries in his life already, and by all accounts should have died long ago. It was still a blow, because I knew how much my family depended on his advice. I’d listened to my father call him many times for wisdom when my parents were fighting about something stupid. They were always fighting about something stupid.
I had wanted to go to the funeral instead of California. Nobody wanted me there. They all wanted me to go ‘have fun like Grandpa would have wanted’. I didn’t really think that’s what he wanted me to do at all. I was fairly confident he wanted me there to comfort my schizophrenic grandmother, as I am her favorite grandchild and the only one she trusts not to wish she was dead so I could have her things.
She shouldn’t trust me, but she does.
I was told that I wasn’t welcome there, and my immediate family were all agreed it was best I was far away. My cousins hate me now, and my Grandmother always says “At Peder’s funeral, Aubrey, it was so nice. It would only have better if you had been there”. Right before she says I need to lose some weight if I don’t want a heart surgery at 33 like my father.
I heard my little brother put a picture of his girlfriend who had recently committed suicide in the casket with him, and asked our Grandpa to take care of her. He has a bumper sticker that says ‘Satan Bless America’ on his Jeep now, and another girlfriend with bigger breasts and less brain than the first.
It was warm and sunny in California that day, but I think it was cool and overcast in Brigham City. I don’t know. I’m sure it was cold in Idaho Falls where they buried him. I know it was cold when I went to see the grave two Memorial Days later. My grandmother cried. I didn’t. She has never forgiven me for that.
Idaho Falls Cemetery isn’t far from a park that overlooks the river, and these huge falls the town was named after. My family was looking at those and remembering my Grandfather, while I stood on the pier, looked at the ocean, and thought about jellyfish.
I hate swimming in the ocean. I watched one of my cousins nearly drown when I was a little girl. I can still remember running behind him, then seeing his body floating down at the bottom of the blue water in our grandparents’ pool. I remember being dragged away across the street, to a stranger’s house, to kneel on the couch and watch the fire trucks come by. No one came to get me for hours.
Drowning is one of my worst fears. I’m an excellent swimmer, I’ve had lessons since before I could walk, but if you get caught by a shark or a tide and dragged down it doesn’t matter how well you can swim. If the ocean wants you, it will win.
That was why I was up on the pier, looking down at the water, even though all of my friends were splashing around below in the waves. They were high waves, white-capped, that broke right on the beach. The other students loved face planting right onto the grainy sand. I couldn’t understand it.
There was a jellyfish warning that day, too. They weren’t the deadly kind, but getting caught would still hurt like hell. One of the boys in our group was stung within a few minutes of our arriving. He’d been hitting the thing with a body board. He claimed the Jellyfish had attacked him.
Jellyfish don’t swim, you know. They can swim by propelling themselves, but never for very long and they rarely do so. Mostly, they are subject to the will of the ocean, just like everything else. All they can really do is float along where they are taken and hope that food comes to them. It usually does, so I suppose the ocean must be generous too.
I could see them floating below me, dead and brown looking. If you didn’t know what they were, you’d probably think they were a ball of seaweed coming to rest on the shore for a while before being swept back out. I watched them move up and down with the water, and found myself wondering what jellyfish think about.
As usual, the logical side of my brain reminded me that it is unlikely that jellyfish can think.
Have you ever been a jellyfish? I asked myself.
No.
Then how do you whether or not a jellyfish can think? If science cannot describe how we as humans think, since we all do it differently, how can they know that a jellyfish doesn’t?
I had no answer for this, and my fancy was allowed to continue uninterrupted.
Since it can’t really do anything but float along, my fancy reasoned, then what else can it really do except think? And if that’s the case, then Jellyfish must certainly all be great philosophers. They had probably reasoned out the Truth centuries before Plato did, since there were so many of them to collaborate with each other. And, if they were that far ahead of us, then they certainly must have figured out the mysteries of the universe.
The logic seemed flawless to me. A jellyfish could do nothing but think and observe, and make theories on their observations. They probably had a jellyfish world-wide web-my logical side let out a scream of protest at this-over which they sent signals to discuss their observations of the silly land creatures that thought the ocean was safe. The jellyfish knew. Maybe they even knew where my grandfather had gone, so I could find him and bring him back to help put my life back together.
That year when I came to school, my parents almost got a divorce, my twin sister moved to Washington, my fourteen-year-old sister tried to kill herself twice, and my younger brother-the one with the Satan sticker-moved out and became gothic.
Until that December, my parents were still fighting about stupid things. Only my father didn’t have Grandpa to talk to anymore, and he didn’t have me to play peacemaker anymore either.
It would take my mother humiliating the whole family on the Today show, with Katie Couric and Matt Lauer, live from Studio 1A, for them to stop fighting about stupid things.
She’d talked to me about it for months before. Said the Today show would be having a special on “emotional cheating”. She was convinced that my father loved a woman he worked with more than he loved her. I didn’t think so. I knew he did. He loved lots of people more than he loved her, because growing up my mother was a cruel person.
A cruel person who would go right from work upstairs to her room, coming down only to yell at us for something we should have done.
But my father and his friend had never been intimate, and both were very professional, if a little playful at times. My mother said it was emotionally cheating on her, that he was wrong, and he was terrible, and she wanted him to come back to her.
I often said nothing in these conversations, except trying to be vaguely sympathetic. She was still my mother, I felt I should try.
The Today show came out, and as predicted they tried to make my Dad look like the worst guy in the universe. They over looked the fact that growing up he was the only one that cooked all our meals, helped with homework, cleaned the house, while mom disappeared for hours to watch TV and play Zuma. All they care about was that he was getting appreciated by a different woman.
It came out that my parents hadn’t had sex since my brother and sister were born, fourteen years before.
I didn’t see the special, I slept in that day. I think everyone else in Utah did. I heard some kids making fun of it when I went to get lunch later. They didn’t know who I was. I was a clump of seaweed, washing towards shore, as far as they knew.
My friends would tell me later that they admired my strength for getting through all that, and still managing to get okay grades. To still smile at them every day and tell them it was a good day, and that I was okay. I told them that I was just caught in a tide.
I don’t think they understood. I don’t either, but that’s nothing new. I’m the only one swimming in this ocean, so all I can do is figure it out myself.
I am a Jellyfish
The conclusion has been reached that I am strange, even for a writer. Because writers are strange in general.
I think I simply spend too much time in my own head. I never stop thinking. There are no moments of silence where my brain does not question one thing or another. The things it thinks are often nonsense. Do leaves know how short their lives are? Do the books that sit on library shelves and are never checked out feel inadequate?
Jellyfish know the secrets of the universe.
I decided this while standing on the dock of a California beach in late July, after my senior year of high school. I had spent the month and a half previously taking classes at Dixie State through a program for low-income, first generation college students that I had been involved in for two years. It was our final trip, to celebrate getting through seven weeks of intense work.
Thousands of miles away, in Brigham City, Utah, it is the day of my grandfather’s funeral.
He had died a few days previously. They were playing “Walking on Sunshine” when my mother called and told me. It wasn’t entirely unexpected; he’d had three heart surgeries in his life already, and by all accounts should have died long ago. It was still a blow, because I knew how much my family depended on his advice. I’d listened to my father call him many times for wisdom when my parents were fighting about something stupid. They were always fighting about something stupid.
I had wanted to go to the funeral instead of California. Nobody wanted me there. They all wanted me to go ‘have fun like Grandpa would have wanted’. I didn’t really think that’s what he wanted me to do at all. I was fairly confident he wanted me there to comfort my schizophrenic grandmother, as I am her favorite grandchild and the only one she trusts not to wish she was dead so I could have her things.
She shouldn’t trust me, but she does.
I was told that I wasn’t welcome there, and my immediate family were all agreed it was best I was far away. My cousins hate me now, and my Grandmother always says “At Peder’s funeral, Aubrey, it was so nice. It would only have better if you had been there”. Right before she says I need to lose some weight if I don’t want a heart surgery at 33 like my father.
I heard my little brother put a picture of his girlfriend who had recently committed suicide in the casket with him, and asked our Grandpa to take care of her. He has a bumper sticker that says ‘Satan Bless America’ on his Jeep now, and another girlfriend with bigger breasts and less brain than the first.
It was warm and sunny in California that day, but I think it was cool and overcast in Brigham City. I don’t know. I’m sure it was cold in Idaho Falls where they buried him. I know it was cold when I went to see the grave two Memorial Days later. My grandmother cried. I didn’t. She has never forgiven me for that.
Idaho Falls Cemetery isn’t far from a park that overlooks the river, and these huge falls the town was named after. My family was looking at those and remembering my Grandfather, while I stood on the pier, looked at the ocean, and thought about jellyfish.
I hate swimming in the ocean. I watched one of my cousins nearly drown when I was a little girl. I can still remember running behind him, then seeing his body floating down at the bottom of the blue water in our grandparents’ pool. I remember being dragged away across the street, to a stranger’s house, to kneel on the couch and watch the fire trucks come by. No one came to get me for hours.
Drowning is one of my worst fears. I’m an excellent swimmer, I’ve had lessons since before I could walk, but if you get caught by a shark or a tide and dragged down it doesn’t matter how well you can swim. If the ocean wants you, it will win.
That was why I was up on the pier, looking down at the water, even though all of my friends were splashing around below in the waves. They were high waves, white-capped, that broke right on the beach. The other students loved face planting right onto the grainy sand. I couldn’t understand it.
There was a jellyfish warning that day, too. They weren’t the deadly kind, but getting caught would still hurt like hell. One of the boys in our group was stung within a few minutes of our arriving. He’d been hitting the thing with a body board. He claimed the Jellyfish had attacked him.
Jellyfish don’t swim, you know. They can swim by propelling themselves, but never for very long and they rarely do so. Mostly, they are subject to the will of the ocean, just like everything else. All they can really do is float along where they are taken and hope that food comes to them. It usually does, so I suppose the ocean must be generous too.
I could see them floating below me, dead and brown looking. If you didn’t know what they were, you’d probably think they were a ball of seaweed coming to rest on the shore for a while before being swept back out. I watched them move up and down with the water, and found myself wondering what jellyfish think about.
As usual, the logical side of my brain reminded me that it is unlikely that jellyfish can think.
Have you ever been a jellyfish? I asked myself.
No.
Then how do you whether or not a jellyfish can think? If science cannot describe how we as humans think, since we all do it differently, how can they know that a jellyfish doesn’t?
I had no answer for this, and my fancy was allowed to continue uninterrupted.
Since it can’t really do anything but float along, my fancy reasoned, then what else can it really do except think? And if that’s the case, then Jellyfish must certainly all be great philosophers. They had probably reasoned out the Truth centuries before Plato did, since there were so many of them to collaborate with each other. And, if they were that far ahead of us, then they certainly must have figured out the mysteries of the universe.
The logic seemed flawless to me. A jellyfish could do nothing but think and observe, and make theories on their observations. They probably had a jellyfish world-wide web-my logical side let out a scream of protest at this-over which they sent signals to discuss their observations of the silly land creatures that thought the ocean was safe. The jellyfish knew. Maybe they even knew where my grandfather had gone, so I could find him and bring him back to help put my life back together.
That year when I came to school, my parents almost got a divorce, my twin sister moved to Washington, my fourteen-year-old sister tried to kill herself twice, and my younger brother-the one with the Satan sticker-moved out and became gothic.
Until that December, my parents were still fighting about stupid things. Only my father didn’t have Grandpa to talk to anymore, and he didn’t have me to play peacemaker anymore either.
It would take my mother humiliating the whole family on the Today show, with Katie Couric and Matt Lauer, live from Studio 1A, for them to stop fighting about stupid things.
She’d talked to me about it for months before. Said the Today show would be having a special on “emotional cheating”. She was convinced that my father loved a woman he worked with more than he loved her. I didn’t think so. I knew he did. He loved lots of people more than he loved her, because growing up my mother was a cruel person.
A cruel person who would go right from work upstairs to her room, coming down only to yell at us for something we should have done.
But my father and his friend had never been intimate, and both were very professional, if a little playful at times. My mother said it was emotionally cheating on her, that he was wrong, and he was terrible, and she wanted him to come back to her.
I often said nothing in these conversations, except trying to be vaguely sympathetic. She was still my mother, I felt I should try.
The Today show came out, and as predicted they tried to make my Dad look like the worst guy in the universe. They over looked the fact that growing up he was the only one that cooked all our meals, helped with homework, cleaned the house, while mom disappeared for hours to watch TV and play Zuma. All they care about was that he was getting appreciated by a different woman.
It came out that my parents hadn’t had sex since my brother and sister were born, fourteen years before.
I didn’t see the special, I slept in that day. I think everyone else in Utah did. I heard some kids making fun of it when I went to get lunch later. They didn’t know who I was. I was a clump of seaweed, washing towards shore, as far as they knew.
My friends would tell me later that they admired my strength for getting through all that, and still managing to get okay grades. To still smile at them every day and tell them it was a good day, and that I was okay. I told them that I was just caught in a tide.
I don’t think they understood. I don’t either, but that’s nothing new. I’m the only one swimming in this ocean, so all I can do is figure it out myself.