Carpe diem

CARPE DIEM

The ticking of wall clock, the clack of the bent fan blade on desk top fan. These are my companions. No attachments. No histories. No surprises in their futures. The basement sublet muffles most noise from the outside. No windows to pique curiosity. No television for current events. No radio for the latest music, only an internet connection for a work from home medical billing job.

Its must easier this way.

Relationships are messy, unpredictable and always painful in their ending.

A therapist hired by my grandmother once asked me what my earliest memory was. I told him walking into my grandmother's kitchen as a boy of around 5 or 6. Smelling the aroma of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies and feeling the heat of the large, white oven that dominated the space.

He asked me if it was a comfortable feeling. I told him it was.

What I never told him in the seven years that I was made to visit with him was that I had two memories from before that. The memories of what brought me to be at my grandmother's house.

I was playing on a lawn of freshly mowed, green grass and throwing a plastic ball, red as a clown's nose. I could hear my father's voice talking behind me in the distance. He was laughing at some comment the neighbor had made from across the fence. The ball soared through the air, across the grass and rolled toward the street and I tottered behind like a paper kite skimming the tops of the blades in a faint breeze.

Shouts. Footsteps, labored breathing and the sound of screaming tires. The smell of burnt rubber on asphalt.

An impact.

“Thank God, Matthew, didn't seem to comprehend what had happened,” mother would say more than once in the days to come. “ He just stood there, dazed.”

But I did understand. My blank look had not been a lack of comprehension or feeling. I had already seen it, many times, in the days before. My father's demise.

The next few months were difficult. Mother cried, grew distant. The people who had filled our home in the days after my father's death had all gone. Their lives returned to normal. Ours were an unpleasant reminder of what could be.

Mother took to sleeping and, in time, rarely rose except to feed me and even that became irregular. The phone would ring but go unanswered. Sometimes there would be knocks at the door but they too went unanswered. Mail dropped in the door slot went unopened.

One night, mother went to sleep but did not awaken.

I sat quietly in the living room. Day turned to night. Then day to night and day to night again until grandmother came with a man in a blue uniform and they took me away.

Grandmother told the therapist I never cried. Not once in all the time from that day until I began my sessions. I wanted to say that it was no great surprise. Like the sun rising or water coming from the tap, it was expected. I had seen these things before. So many times I was numb to them.

But even then, so young, something told me I could not speak it. And though I would test this knowledge in my reckless teens, at that time I remained ever silent saying only what I felt they wanted to hear me say and nothing more.

In high school I had a friend. Heidi O'dea. She moved in awkward strides like a colt on wobbly legs and had a mane of golden hair than sparkled in the sun. We used to talk. I loved her laugh. What would we be when we grew up? Would we get Mrs Peterson or Mr. Taft for social studies next year? Was pizza really the best food ever?

In tenth grade, students went on a weekend field trip to McConnell Lake. Ostensibly it was to learn about nature and ecosystems but we all knew it would really be about swimming and kayaking on the lake, staying up late and telling stories around the campfire and stolen kisses behind the cabins. We were teenagers after all.

But I never went to McConnell Lake. I had been under the weather for several days before that. Or so I had told my grandmother. And on the day we were to meet in the school's gymnasium parking lot, I was retching and so ill that I had to stay home in bed.

Fifteen students died in a fire in the main hall on Saturday night. Faulty wiring in the old building it was said. At least twice that many suffered injuries. It was the last year the school held the field trip.

The day before we were to leave, I told Heidi. In a rambling rush of fear, adrenaline and hormones I laid out what would happen. I watched her face change from confusion to mild amusement to consternation and then dismissive resolve.

Perhaps I should be a writer, she had said. She never new I had such a vivid imagination. She'd never seen me this way. She wasn't sure she liked it.

Finally, she got up, shouldered her book bag and said goodbye. She hoped she would see me on the bus in the morning. But I wasn't sure she hoped that at all. Much like the way we form a kind, yet careful, response when we open up a surprise package that does not meet our expectation, I was not what she had supposed and, perhaps, no longer to her liking.

School was canceled for the week after the tragedy. I only interacted with Heidi once after that.

The first day we returned I saw her in the hall. We stopped, facing one another a mere three feet apart as people rushed by around us like water passing two stones in a river.

She looked at me in the way my grandmother would, in later years, look at photos of relatives or places she had been. Seeing something familiar and yet not quiet explainable as if she did not trust that was she saw was as she supposed it was and the knowledge frightened her.

In those brief moments that our eyes met, I saw that she knew I had been right. In every detail I had captured not only the incident itself but the fear and pain and chaos it had evoked.

She did not speak to me. We never spoke again. She hugged her books to her chest and slid by me, merging with the sea of students in the hall around us like a piece of flotsam carried off by the tide.

Sadly, precognition does not extend to my own actions.

If it had, I might have never said a word and spared myself the loss of a dear friend. Or worse.

As a Junior in college I exited the main library building after an evening of study and slipped on the rain soaked steps, sliding from top to bottom in a few, frantic seconds before twisting my left leg into a most unnatural position. It took over a year of surgery and physical therapy to put it right again. I was still in a cast when I hobbled across the stage to pick up my degree the following year. I walk with a limp even now.

So I came to understand that it was of no benefit to those who did not believe me and no benefit to me either.

Over the years I tried many times to understand the ability. I tried to see its usefulness, tried to be a force for change. One can only be patronized so many times or looked upon with fear, loathing, or worse, suspicion. One can only feel the pain of adversity and death upon those one loves so many times without hope or mechanism to provide aid. The psyche is only so strong.

So the days pass. Numbers and zeros on a computer screen. Electronically deposited checks to a bank branch I never step foot in. Orders for food, clothing and sundries placed online and delivered, anonymously, to my door. The tick of the 2^nd hand on wall clock. The rising and setting of the sun.

These are my days. A prison? Selfishness? Madness?

Superheros are for children. Super powers are for fools.