Heroin Memory

My heart is trapped in a white stucco box and I cry a lot for my home. The missing is overwhelming. The greenest of greens and the bluest of blues make for tough competition in this dull suburbia. There is little hope that growing up in a tight knit community, remote from the impersonal city, accessible only by boat, could leave room for any favorable feelings about cookie cutter communities where you don’t know your neighbor’s name. Especially not when you get ripped violently away, with little chance to say goodbye. So I go back inside my head and live there again, for little moments of my day.
I close my eyes and I sit in my living room. In the brown padded mahogany rocking chair, beside the fireplace, looking out of the massive window. Watching the sun sparkle on the water in summer time, the tides forever rolling, fat snowflakes falling and accumulating, endless rain pouring down. And I notice all the details. Smell the fresh air off the water on a sunny day. The sudden rush of noise from the streams outside when the windows are opened. The dust floating in the beams of sunlight from the skylights.
My memory is a photograph. Thousands, millions, trillions of them. Put them all together and play them back. My mind is the cinema, the film of my life. This scratchy second-hand computer chair becomes a folding red fake-velvet chair when I close my eyes.
The infinite space inside when you close your eyes. The boundlessness of the mind and memory.
I open up all the cupboards to make sure I don’t forget where anything goes. The big white buckets of flour and sugar. We used to stand on them as children to see over the counter top. Jam and cereal above the toaster. Plates and glasses beside the sink. I look up at the knots in the wood of the boards and beams. A foot print on a board of the ceiling. Count how many logs support the roof, the ceiling. Six big gleaming cedar beams stretch along above the living room, the dining room, the computer area. There were no level floors, nor parallel lines in that log cabin. It was easier to jump and touch the roof by the kitchen window than it was to do the same a few feet over by the stove. Truly a hippie creation. Everything was character; it oozed with it.
I was there for 18 years. Everything that makes me who I am happened there. My dad’s huge strong gentle hands holding me steady while I learned to ride my bike on the neighbor’s lawn. (It was covered with old carpet. I don’t know why, but it made riding a bike with training wheels easier. Carpet would do where there was no concrete.) Building forts. Climbing trees, to the top. As high as we could go before the branches got too small. Feeling so alive, up so high. Rock hopping up and down the creek, naming pools and racing sticks. Walking free through the forest trails. Musty loamy earth smell. Making mud pies. When pretend was real. Childhood.
I can’t bring myself to accept that it’s not my home anymore, it would bring my world to a crashing end.
I run my hands over the writing that two little girls scrawled on the wall. Closet. Bed goes here. Dresses. I can smell the soft sharp musty smell of the closet. I walk across the room to the window. Yellow shag carpet, the devourer of countless earrings. By the time I reach the window, it turns to the new lavender carpet laid down by my dad. One minor update in our hippie haven. Two impish little girls used to hide in the wide windowsill, behind the orange, yellow and green curtains, then behind the split bamboo one, waiting for the lion to come and tickle them to death. When I was bigger I used to crunch my legs up and sit in that windowsill looking out the window, staring and contemplating issues beyond my years. A wall of green trees climbing to the top of a mountain out the back door. Love. Death. Separation.
Missing that which you cannot have is the greatest torture.
I walk across the floor and hear the creaks and groans. The squeak of the back door and the rumble of the sliding glass door. There was no sneaking home after curfew with that glass door on guard. The whole house talked. Down the little hill, the noticeable slope in the hall to my parent’s bedroom, and out onto the deck. The window became a door one summer. Hot dry heat of the sun on the deck. Dusty dried pollen on the beige fiberglass, under a child’s feet, pubescent toes, teenage soles. The ocean breeze meeting me. The smell of salt water and fresh water mixing. River mouths are where destiny is constantly and continuously happening.
I walk barefoot down the front path. Mud squishing between little toes. Prickly grass itching ankles. Past the pond. One winter when it froze solid. Washing dirt off freshly picked carrots at its banks. Filling watering cans with its crisp cool water for the garden. And I can still count the number of patio stones, fighting against the quagmires in the path. Watch my feet pick nimbly, effortlessly across the roots and rocks. I could do it with my eyes closed, even still.
Our memories are what make us who we are, connecting the past with the present. Life stories. Fragmented bits that to the owner make perfect sense. My most cherished memories live there, the ones that make me me. How could I ever let them go? I can’t. Never.
The butterfly bush is so beautiful in springtime. And then it snowed too hard and its branches broke. Was it only 18 seasons I watched pass by there? The beach was a beach, sand and all. Then the creek came and swept it all away. Waking up, walking out my bedroom door and looking out of the skylight down toward the dock. Distant vague pain growing in my feet from the hard nubs of the pseudo-carpet under them as I stood, a statue, staring. November 30th 2001, the boat sunk. Seeing your only lifeline to “town” - the boat that brought you home from the hospital as a newborn, the boat that you relied on nearly every day of your life- with only the bow peeking out of the water, the rest submerged, was near sickening. The memory in hindsight is worse, knowing that it was the last straw for parents that were struggling to make ends meet, knowing that it confirmed the decision to sell the house and move. Watching strangers walk through your home, knowing they could not appreciate it for what it was. Sneering, snickering. Hearing them talk about tearing it down, rebuilding, hiding the logs with drywall. Hurt. Walking through, touching, smelling, hearing, imprinting it into my memory. Even then.
The stories I tell, people don’t believe. The lawn flooded and we canoed across to get to school. A bear was on the front lawn and a cougar was at the sliding glass door at 5am. It snowed so much one year Don came by with his tractor and made a path for us, three foot walls of white! People thought we were nuts for living there, like that. They just don’t understand. The power went out the week of Christmas and we ate pasta cooked on top of the wood stove. All the neighbors came over and shared with us.
It was a small town in a way. It was a family, a community. There was space and freedom and peace. When my parents first moved up, it was only them and one other. Mom would garden naked and Dad would mow the lawn just the same. Det, the other one, used to grow pot and steal hydro, right straight from the main tower. There were no rules of conformity back then. It was remote, but close. It was beautiful. It was everything. It is the home of my heart and soul.
Nothing yet comes close to comparing. I can feel myself drying out inside, stuck here in this dull stucco box, on a normal street with a real driveway. Where fences cut neighbors off from each other. Where my only view is the neighbor’s house, with blinds drawn at all times. Where I have to cross a busy street to get to any forest paths. It’s claustrophobia here. So I replenish my thirsty soul with juicy memories.
My friend was sharing the same grief as me; he too was torn away from that magical childhood place of ours. I told him that everything happens just as it should in some ways. As soon as it happens, whether we judge it as good or bad, it just is. And it becomes a part of our stories. The kinks in our paths. The wrinkles in our skin and chasms in our souls. So maybe the pain isn’t in vain? It makes us who we are. And then, when we learn from it and we come back into balance with ourselves, its just one more memory. It’s just one more thing that has collectively shaped us. Then I said that the most gnarled piece of driftwood is often the most beautiful one.
I think I was trying to bring peace to myself as much as I was to him. It doesn’t really help. I indulge in idealistic memories but deep down I know it’s not the same anymore. I can never go back. I’ve gone back, to visit, but it will never be my home again. Not like it was before. The people have changed. The Linton’s painted the wood of my cedar home. White. It would be very difficult to get all that paint off now. They argue more and people’s properties have grown boundaries. The dock is rotting, but no one is fixing it. It is not the same. So I relive it they way I want to remember it. They way I love it so much.
Knowing you cannot go back is having your heart ripped out and stomped on with cleated boots. And we kick ourselves for not appreciating what we had while we had it. Six thousand five hundred and seventy days, give or take a few, I looked out of those big front windows. A panoramic landscape filling my eyes. Fuchsia sunsets. White cap winter storms. Azure skies, emerald mountains and golden grass. Somehow over the years it lost its luster. That wasn’t one of my memories, the lost luster, but my friend reminded me that yes, I really did want to leave after eighteen years. Part of me asks myself “What were you thinking?” The other half knows.
Remembering is agony.
But everything is magic in hindsight.
Remembering is bliss.


I wrote this for a creative writing class a few months back,a part of my biography. I'm posting it because so much of me is explained in these words and sentences. It will make future posts make more sense, I think.