If you are lucky growing up you will hardly experience anything of consequence, and mundane stupidities will take on epic form, and become legitimate stand-ins for all the love and anguish in the world. I will write it another way. If you are lucky — there are still difficult things, because there are always difficult things, but they don't stick, and it's like you just brush past them. Perhaps some things do stick, but if you are lucky you only learn that later on, and for a long time they don't cause trouble. But what some come to learn later on is that there is little of no consequence and much that does stick; and even to brush past something can be a long discomfort, regardless of it having passed, because its contact is really what sticks. You know this when you are very young and later you forget and later some know it again. I don't like the word 'you' but only use it to avoid 'I' which is worse. I will write it another way. I have always had good luck but am at times so lacking in self-knowledge I doubt this. What is past is distant and near all at once. What is past is North. What is past I could dismiss as melodrama — I think it is the melodrama (of past experience: contact, feeling) that embarrasses me — or what embarrasses me (or, worse, makes me afraid) is that in revisiting a thing I might brush past that which I purposely forgot — or that in revisiting I might know for the first time a thing I said but without understanding then what I said. Writing these words always risks the double vision of coming to know, a renewed understanding which is compelling but makes me afraid. I will write it another way
Boiled beef and carrots Magical Realism, 2010-13