I've just recovered some of my older writings from a dying laptop. This seems as good a place as any to preserve them for posterity, and in perpetuity. Memory is so fickle a thing; I actually discover things about myself in these pieces that I've long forgotten, but must remember. I'll time-stagger the publications so as not to dump them all at once. Some of this is actually not too bad, and the rest is atrocious - you've been warned.
A
Glimpse of Life
In life, we have every opportunity to look
back on our lives – to question the path we have chosen, to agonize over
blunders, to remember all that was and never will be – yet rarely do we
approach such an effort with unqualified zeal or methodical erudition. The past
is what it should be - past. Coerced, the mind surveys its labyrinth of dreams
and memories, laboring to detach reality from fiction. It is the fiction we are
left with, a sop of smells and sounds and images dislodged to quiet our despair
and inoculate our future. In this lies our survival, for the past bleeds our
faith, and the future drains our hope.
The first sound I remember is the wind rushing
past; the first sight – a coat of fur pressing my cheek, my uncle opening a
taxi door, the one who held me rushing inside. The wind, you see, I would have
caught a cold. I was born in a maternity hospital in the former Soviet
Socialist Republic of Moldova. Improbable, I know, yet I seem convinced that I
remember the day I left, or parts of it, that is. Perhaps it was a dream, but
better that it be the way I like it - memory. I was a studious, excelling
child. I knew my classmates before I knew to wipe; this, too, I soon learned,
for cleanliness is a hallmark of civility, and civility trumps truth. My
childhood was swept along in a sweet haze, a warm embrace of curious,
self-righteous naiveté from which I've yet to recover. Oh, sure, I did the
things that all kids do, and did them no worse than did you, or he, or she.
Never has there ever been a time so pure, nor heart so sated, as in those first
few years of life. A flash remains, a fuzzy memory, when all that's left for
one to see is me, today.
I found myself at the Sheremetevo Airport in
Moscow in late fall of ninety one, sleeping, propped up against some suitcases
– the remnants of our past lives. Three days hence, I would be celebrating my
ninth birthday in freedom, having already banished the childhood from my psyche
with a glee I now find short-sighted. Education followed; a decade's worth of
standards and the known to all curriculum. Years spent with my head in the
water, literally, burning myself up to race the clock against another. How apt
a metaphor that is, for those years, how precise, uncanny! Not still
perfection, mind you, but the perfect solitude of a kind – of mind and thought.
I reveled in thought, dissecting inputs and calculating output; it would take
time to internalize this process of reflection and contemplation. My every
movement was awkward, contrived, conspicuous; I would learn to harness my body
to complement the social environment – social reflexology, one might say.
I was betrayed to learn how shoddy this world
is, how tenuous its foundations, how incompetent its tenants, how disjointed
its procedures; I learned so at my first real job. A remnant of my youth,
perhaps, yet I did not grasp, before, that only people – living flesh,
malleable and prone to emotional instability – held the key to labor and
completion of tasks, the functioning of civilization. I had thought that all
was run as the ticking of a clock – methodical and precise, input and output.
How rudely awakened I was to discover that sticky human nature, wetware they
call it, and not ideas (read "ideals") – clear, concise and mechanical
in their certitude – would determine the course of events in my life, as in all
lives. Unacceptable, unavoidable, and years gone by I still feel pain from
this. How it hurt me the first time that logic ran a brick wall of emotion and
lost! How I reeled from this defeat – that I could never explain, that they
would never understand. What horror that is, to be alone, with ideas that
failed, and not have recourse.
