Zel-kun’s Words

My earliest of the earliest memories are not truly memories, but images.  An assembly of light and color burned into my brain as though their significance should never be forgotten.  Unfortunately whatever important bit of information those images were supposed to relay is long gone, leaving only a curious picture in my mind to be looked at questioningly like a misunderstood piece of modern art at a gallery.

A white ceiling, some black tile, a little white piano, a blackboard, a white robe, a black bird, a pink sky.  I’m sure that at the time these were the most fascinating things I had seen.

As time passes, the images slowly become wider and longer, expanding past a single moment in time and becoming an event, a memory encompassing several moments.  Like the images, these events are disjointed and sporadic, and I could not say which order they happened in chronologically.  I can say that these events helped shape who I am to some primal degree, that they stand out as beacons to be seen within the darkness of my early childhood.

I was in the park that was across the street from my house, and it had rained recently.  I stood atop the slide I remember to be fifty feet tall, which was likely only six or seven feet.  I was eating crackers, those tasteless saltine crackers, and my grip on one of them slipped.  I dove after it, which of course led to me tumbling over the edge and splashing into the mud.  I distinctly remember the mud-splattered crackers.

I remember that I awoke one night and saw a pair of glowing red eyes on the metal rotor of the ceiling fan.  I was terrified and entranced at the same time, and I stared at it all night.  I remember thinking that I was cursed because of it in the subsequent years of my childhood.  What were the eyes?  Hell if I know, I was just a kid.  Could have been any of a thousand rational explanations.

I was riding my big-wheel in a tennis court around sunset, and another kid asked if he could ride it.  I remember being very scared that if I let him ride it, he’d run me over.  But being the naive, trusting person I was, I let him.  And being the unlucky person I was, I was then run over.  I recall my father bursting out of the house and chasing the kid off.

I remember my parents yelling and me hiding in the darkness of my bedroom.

I remember sitting in the bar my mother was a waitress at.

I remember taking a sip of of beer that I thought was apple juice that was sitting on the kitchen table.

I remember seeing my little brother stumble down the hallway out of his room as he took his first steps.

Beyond that, the events become slightly more clear, and the circumstances of those events begin to reveal themselves, but that is a story for another day… another chapter.