Life in Capital Letters

There’s something about a Sunday. Something about this time of day, too. This temperature - the windows are cracked open and a not-as-cool-as-we’d-hoped, fall-ish breeze is anemically moving the air in the room. The curtains are gathered up to the side, making the windows look like giant, winking eyes.

Those once-amber window eyes are dimming, casting long bookshelftabletvchair shaped shadows on the dirt colored carpet. The animals are half-asleep, curled into shadowy, amorphous fur heaps on the floor.

The last golden shaft of light retreating from the apartment hits the side of my face as I lay wrong-ways across the bed, consumed by the book I’m reading. Too hot for October, the light warms my face and the hair that’s escaping my sloppy ponytail. My hair is illuminated, its sun-bleached auburn streaks glimmering in the light. I can smell my warmed skin, and I like it. I feel human, the pleasantness of this feeling is honed to a sharp stabbing point by an accompanying, crushing sense of mortality.

I feel squeezed, like through a tunnel, back to childhood - which, odd though it may seem, makes me think of being old. I’m transported to late summer/early fall (in GA these are often difficult to distinguish) which we always mistakenly called Indian summer. I’m in the non air-conditioned house that my grandparents lived in for their last 30 years. My grandfather sits on the front porch in silence, listening to the last of the cicadas hum. I’m sitting in a recliner next to an open window in the living room, reading a book with my feet propped up. Just a month ago, the ceiling fan churned air as thick as honey. Now the air is lighter, but that means summer is dying and a certain sad resignation hovers in the cloudless sky. The smell of the tea olive blooming under the window is overwhelming. The warmth and the flowery scent in the air are soporific. The light is fading fast, stretching shadows like rubberbands. My grandmother shuffles into the room (her bedroom slippers making a ‘shhff-shhff’ sound across the rough pinewood floor) and gently chastises me for reading in the “dark”, which to her is anything less than a floodlight’s brightness. She switches on a lamp and shhff-shhffs to the dining room to watch Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy. I miss a beat as I realize that I hadn’t been reading anyway, but instead watching the shadows lengthen, lost in a muddy world of thought. I shrug, toss my book on the arm of the chair and join her.

Now it’s nearly 15 years later (ohgod) and I’m sitting in a dark room. The light has receded from the room like the tide going out, leaving these detritus-memories beached here. My grandparents are gone and that house with the pinewood floors and ceiling-fan churned air is 500 miles away. Thousands of moments that have stretched in between press on my head like a hangover headache, from the choppy seas of my latechildhood-teens-youngadulthood to the placid, mirror-like lake of my life now.
A hard knot constricts my guts as I wonder if I’ll ever again feel anything as passionately as I used to, or if life will just continue to grow more predictable and less mysterious as the years pass.

Is hope just the static-cling of memories you can no longer pull apart into separate events.. and a desperate desire to have some of the wonder of childhood again?

Even if every day stretches out before me with the flatness and dryness of a desert, and all I have are feelings of humanness and mortality, these moments of twilit rooms and memories, well, I suppose that’s enough.