Gone Astray [1]

Sometimes I fear that my head is nothing more than a dull, brass bell. That there’s no form, no control, just the reverberation of stimuli through a medium—a unique medium, perhaps, but a fixed one nonetheless.

Normally, there are motley enough impulses drumming at the brass that I don’t think about it. I can listen to the melodies they produce, melodies unfathomable enough in their variations that I can pretend they sprung from within. But when I return home—well, then I have an awakening. Because home is where the memories are. Where you face it all again to find that, returned, your bell-head isn’t ringing all that differently these days, not when you set the same old rooms and faces to tugging its rope. You realize you can’t tell the echoes from the sound, past from present. Your sense of being is unmoored. And suddenly, there is no you at all. Only the bell. A cracked, brass bell.

These are the kind of worries you can’t lay to rest. There are no answers, no resolutions to be had for them. Worries like that come to haunt you from the deep and you can do nothing save writhe in their grasp until, benumbed, you’re no longer sport enough to bother plaguing. You crawl back into the world of the living. The old demons lie… in wait, anyway.

Here, in the walls of my parents’ apartment, I swear I can feel them. Those demons. This place isn’t any of the trailers or rentals I wallowed my youth away in, but all the furniture is the same, and it’s enough to see all the dinted wood and stained couches. It’s enough to have to ignore all the photos of a face, a reflection that never really changed while my father lumbers out to the sitting room to greet me.

We talk. But he always was a simple man, and now he’s a tired one, too. I have replies memorized for him as though by rote; I spend the conversation mulling over how long it took me to love him in more than the abstract. It’s reassuring that I can smile indulgently while he talks to me over the i-gadget he’s clutching as though it’s medicinal, as though his eyes can’t do without the stimulation. It’s reassuring that I no longer cringe when my mother rounds the corner to gripe shrilly at him for his incurable sloth. All the revulsion is gone.

What an injustice, then, that I still can’t relax—I can’t chuckle or ease back into my seat and enjoy that nameless, warm feeling you’d call nostalgia if only it were inflated with longing. Instead, I’m nervous. There’s the sour stench of me in all these rooms of old. I wonder if it would it have killed my father to buy new furniture instead of the flatscreen at our backs.

…I pinch the bridge of my nose and mention that it’s very, very late. I add that planes leave me drowsy. And, though it’s only ten, my parents shrug. We’ve never lived much alike, and as the years have progressed they’ve stopped so much as acknowledging it-- if they acknowledge it they’ll have to make excuses. It’s almost too much effort to make excuses for themselves, these days.

I rise and pad down the hall to the guest room. Then I bite my lip as my old sheets and desk and dresser greet me; even back then I took good care of my things.

The sooner you sleep the sooner morning will come. It’s a mantra of mine, and it’s especially poignant while I stand here.

I’ve returned, you see, to my parents’ latest residence in the same tired old village we’ve ever known, because an acquaintance of mine is in a hospital nearby. Come the dawn, I can leave to see him if only I endure that long.

God, I felt such keen misery back then. It comes to me now in droves, the symptoms of what I was, half-forgotten deliriums glutted by new and inchoate significance.

I can’t say what the images were or are. That’s the worst part. I can’t fight them like I used to, can’t fell them by imagination. It’s my flesh that remembers, not me. My body sags instinctively toward the imprint of my adolescent fevers where they stain the mattress. Fear rises like bile in my throat, my heart drums commands against my ribcage so heated that my lungs are stunned of breath. Familiar foes, one and all.

What’s familiar is usually my foe.

Impulsively, I take my pillows and move them to the foot of the bed. I tear the blanket from the mattress and wrap it around me like a cocoon. Then I lie down diagonally. Break the ritual, I think, break the curse.