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Sepia Tones
We'd made a fair dent in all of the boxes within the first month of moving in, which comes naturally with a need to fill book cases, CD towers, wardrobes, kitchen cupboards. But there were some stubborn boxes left over that had been put aside and left for another day. Within a box within a box I found a handful of memories and childhood fantasies. The box wasn't sealed from the elements so they were showing signs of degrading and some of the colors had run.
I flicked through the pile and paused on a teenage fantasy where I was sitting in an old style barber's chair in KD Lang's place, while Cindy Crawford pretended to shave my face and run her hands over my cheeks. Next to it was a memory of venturing out into central Paris and surfacing from the Metro system amidst a gay pride march. In some cases the fantasies and memories had stuck together with age and the sight of a very young me getting further than second base came as a shock.
The further down the pile I flipped, the more basic the fantasies and memories became. There was one of me on the deck of a boat, the surrounding ocean was blue and calm because I couldn't remember anything more than the boat. Another of my sister and I running alongside grapevines from an unknown shadow. Some memories come with a flush of shame or a burst of soundtrack. I remembered faces and people I had seen but never knew, some pictures were lost entirely but I could still tell who it was supposed to be.
Near the bottom of the pile I found a crayon drawing of me as a dog. There was a big red ball sitting on top of scribbles of green, I looked like Rolf from the Muppets. Distended black V's in the sky stood in for birds and there was a wide empty gap between the green of the grass and the blue of the sky. The next one down showed four people and a house, two parents, two children, we were all smiling. That one was my earliest fantasy.
Sep. 6.2007