Personal Essay: Metonymic Illuminations from my Childhood

The window on the landing of my childhood home is softly illuminated. It’s late at night. I am home again. At nearly a quarter past eleven, tired from over seventeen hours of driving over the course of two days, the cigarette in my hand still burns incandescently, as I look up at it from the outdoors, surrounded by a symphony of chirping cicadas and crickets.

My sense of adultness withers, despite my repetitive motions of smoking a cancer stick, and I lurch back into the illuminations of my childhood, a soft reverie of gauzy memories that appear then dissipate, all of them overcast in pink and yellow hues, much like the luminous shades of light that cast themselves from the window and spread gently across the patio upon which I sit by myself.

The portrait of a thin Native American man hides behind the ruffled curtains, a painting my mother created when I was no more than five or six years of age, is stoically obscured from my view, a reminder of all things that have now long been cast aside, all long gone, and impenetrable, yet set decisively and ruthlessly in stone. The small table, with numerous books sitting atop it, hides the set of dark wooden stairs leading to the second floor, a short staircase I have stomped up and down on so numerously that I can still travel it in the dead of night without light. With each passing time that I walked up and down those stairs, stomping on the landing, without thinking twice, the clock would, inevitably, strike more strokes, a bricolage of moments in which I lost track of memories, now rendered in the alterity of forgetful time. But now, aware of my mortality and its relation to my past, I draw smoke from my cigarette, pushing at that alterity of forgetful time, demanding that it give me some center — a linear string of meaning, a storyline — but instead it morphs into a palimpsest of deeper, more imprecise memories of my past. Can anything really be salvaged?

Fleeting, like whispers on the mouth of a lover in the throes of an orgasm, the salvific attempt of the reclamation of childhood stops short. Synchrony has become my worst enemy, despite the fact that I spend my days reading the histories of people spread across time and space. I let out another plume of smoke, smash my cigarette into the ashtray, light another one up, sip bourbon, and sigh, realizing the delimitation around my childhood memories. I conclude that memories of childhood act in a metonymic manner. There is the broken tooth and blood, for when I was only two and fell into the fireplace hearth, violently breaking my front tooth. The Christmas tree(s) remind me of a long, cold holiday. The dead horse makes me recall my sixteenth year in high school. Meandering back and forth across waves of remembrance, they all seem to crash down now, at this age, right now, right here, like some brutal fait accompli. But is that true? A kaleidoscope of imagery from the childhood montage of memories fills the holes in my mind: here I am three, then I am five, suddenly I am ten, and so it goes. The light on the landing goes out; my memories continue to flicker.

The heat consumes me — I cough. I put out my last cigarette of the night, stabilizing myself. The memories of childhood recede and then are extinguished. Until tomorrow night with the phantasms of childhood’s past, I drag myself towards the stairs, in the dark, with no light, and head into the future.