Dormant Memories
Nate Forsythe
I want to imagine that a near death experience is the reason for my fear. I want some explanation besides that God has a sense of humor and that it’s some poetic joke that I should be afraid of the essence of life. I drink it. I am composed of it. And yet in various forms it leaves me gasping for air. I am thirsty for my old life and God can only hand me a new glass of water. He then watches as my knees grow weak, and my body trembles as I yearn for my old glass to be full again.
I imagine His face, lined like a map of my home town. His dimple is where my old house is. “A wonderful home with all of the charm and grace of the 1850’s and yet with many updates and improvements for contemporary living.” His ear is Florida, the lobe Tampa, a piece of earwax my parent’s new house. They say it is lovely. It has a pool. I have not seen the house or the pool. I have no desire to see them. I hear it doesn’t snow in earwax. That is enough of a reason for me to stay in the comfortable dip of God’s dimple.
I wonder if the real estate agent knows anything about us. Does she know that when I was two my father got a job as a economics professor at the University of Iowa; when I was three my parents visited me in Korea, adopted me, transplanted me from Seoul to Iowa City almost as abruptly as the time my mother transplanted her tomato plant from the front yard to the backyard, because of the lack of sun; when I was four I could always be found in the elbow of my house’s hallway, curled up like yarn on the heat vent that always resided there. Until the day that I was not, until the day when I almost died in a hospital.
I don’t remember if I was missed when I was in the hospital because of pneumonia. I don’t remember being afraid, or being more uncomfortable than usual. I was four and still fragile like that tomato plant. I was used to being uncomfortable, used to not knowing a new language, used to pointing, to gesturing, to creative sign language as the only way of communicating. I don’t remember my feelings that day, but I am sure I was used to the hospital’s environment. Everything but the smell.
When I think about my fear I think about death. There are two things about death that I am sure of: I am not afraid of it, and I never want to die in a hospital. Death can be beautiful, but death does not smell beautiful. A hospital smells like a hospital; a hospital smells like death. It is better to see death, better to see its circle. I picture the colors of life, the reds, the oranges, the yellows. They float, and ripple. They dance with the light of the sun and then with time fall to the ground. And with time, become airborne again as childhood throws them as high as possible in a last attempt to save their beauty: clear! clear. clear. clear. But God has a sense of humor. God makes beauty smell like compost, or worse. And that is what they become, as they eventually fall for the second or third time and then are raked and compiled in plastic bags.
Death can be as beautiful as the next spring, and reek like its maggots. Fear smells this way, tastes this way and every time fear tingles my spine I am brought back to that breakfast of oats when I first tasted the reality of it: the trails, the white, the squirming; my mom had given life to these creatures by leaving the top of a cereal box open for a couple of days. I was their reaper that breakfast; I was Death, but it was I who felt the chill. It was my breath that quickened, my lungs that spent the rest of the morning drowning in a pool of cold sweats. The maggots were ignorant. They were bliss; they had no memories to lose; they were fearless. I am still envious. God’s joke: I am a leaf afraid of losing my chlorophyll. I am Death in a fetal position. I am an essay about conquering an unknown fear.
***
“There are three bedrooms, two baths (one with a spa shower) and a large family room as well as a second floor lounge/office area.” Again she swings. Again she misses. A house is built of memories not bathrooms and floors. The tiles, the wallpaper, the rooms are meaningless without the marks of childhood. The muddy handprint. The chipped paint. The once broken door and its frame, which at this moment still has dates written in blue pen on it; on January 25, 2000 I was five foot; On February 10th, I was five-three; On February 23rd, I was five-one. The new residents will appreciate the spa shower and the two bathrooms, but my handprints, my tantrums, and my tiptoed height will forever lose their value.
I spent last spring with a friendly group in Carmarthen Wales. I spent it kayaking in His veins, trekking across His lotioned skin, and climbing His white beard: a 2,000 foot mountain in Wales. They call it Snowden. I remember many cold Iowan winters, and how the snow was always more than a formality between rain and cold weather. I remember how it was a reason, a reason to go sledding down the once green hills of the parks that resided by my house, a reason to spend a lazy afternoon in front of a window engrossed in a blanket, a good book, and a mug of hot chocolate, a reason to watch A Christmas Story and live out the pole licking, the layered clothing (as if all parents’ would rather have a bulky carpet of winter clothing than a cold son or daughter), and the dreaming for a shot out eye, which as long as self inflicted would be seen more as a great story than a loss of a sense. But a cold Iowan winter cannot compare to the intense frigid cold that resided on that mountain. I remember how the snow and the wind slowly stole my senses away. At first it was my sight, then a numbing of the skin, and then all sound seemed to blend into the noise of the blowing wind. All that was left was a smell and a taste of something unfamiliar: a sense of serenity.
In reality, there should have been the scent of hospital whipping in the air and a white slimy crawling in my mouth, but there wasn’t. We couldn’t see the thousand foot drop offs that were five feet to the left or right. We couldn’t feel our body core temperatures creeping towards hypothermia, couldn’t hear any screaming, any talking at all, just the wind. Earlier, before I left with my group for Snowden I received an email: “Dear Nate, your father got a job at USF. Our house is up for sale. Don’t fall off that mountain. I have taken your solid ground, your memories. Don’t fall off that mountain, love mom.”
It is funny what I thought about that day. How I should have thought about the danger I was in, about the danger my group was in, about the friend who was stumbling and stuttering from early stages of hypothermia, but still could only think about the day I found my cat hidden inside a small cupboard, breathing his last warm breath; how I tried to pet life back into him as I slowly whispered his eulogy of the good times; the tuna, the purring, the nights spent in my lap, or arms, or bed. I thought about how every time I pass that cupboard I am reminded of him.
I felt safe in the memory. I wanted to stay there. I wanted to curl up in the cupboard with him and be sheltered from the wind and the snow. Felt that if I held on to the memory tight enough that no mountain could best me, no absence of a house could take hold of me. I was deaf, numb and blind, and through ignorance felt nothing but nostalgia as my feet kept me moving in the correct path and as my mind wandered off the edges and dove, headfirst, into the rocky snows of the soon to be forgotten. When that cupboard disappears from my life will my memories be forever locked in the wood?
***
It is a new December. There is no snow on the ground. The high of the day is fifty-five degrees and I feel like I should be outside playing Frisbee. In a week my parents will have completely moved out of our house. In a week the maggots will multiply exponentially. In a week I will smell more of that hospital and this essay will probably still be unfinished.
I mentioned before that I am not afraid of death, but that is a lie. I am terrified of it. Not of my own death. I am terrified of watching my memories, the ones that molded me, painted me, wrote me, slip away because of a physical loss. I wonder how two things so intertwined can survive without each other. I picture the chlorophyll-less leaf. I know that hidden inside it is my solution and that there is a solution in my mountain experience too. I am more beautiful without my essence. I feel safer when I am in the most danger.
I have no idea what lies in front of me, or my parents, or my old house. I don’t know who will be living in it and making new memories. I don’t care to know, but I am sure that I will. I am coming to a realization that memory loss is a part of life, that loss may make life more beautiful, more vibrant, but that realization is still not comforting for me.
I instead picture that beautiful Welsh mountain. I feel it pushing against me. I smell the fresh cold air as the wind blows pygmy snowflakes across my skin. I notice the glistening lake off in the distance, the trees growing diagonally on an adjacent cliff. I am alone this time. There is no danger. No hypothermia. Just my five senses, and a dancing in my stomach that is brought to reality in a floating red leaf: It is a dying memory as dormant as the ground we walk on, as dormant as a twig, as a snowflake. Yet the leaf’s path towards the ground is a beautiful waltz and I am tempted to catch it before it hits, but instead let it land. And as it hits, the land seems to smile at me.