my devoted attention
(this has sprung out of necessity)
I’ve been thinking about it.
All of it.
I’ve been tracing my fingers over the nearly illegible handwriting of my journals, trying to answer the question: why do I get so routinely enticed into the crowded corners of childhood memory? I am stuck, most days, somewhere between age 3 and 17. Even when I’m unaware of it, I’m constantly excavating lost details, chipping away at whatever I can find. Finding my way back to something.
I call my mom often - we try to eat lunch together through a computer screen a few times each week. I’m eating two-day-old leftovers of Alison Roman’s frizzled chickpeas. She’s eating cauliflower soup with a sliced honey crisp apple, crunching loudly through the distorted laptop audio. We laugh across the distance.
I am her only daughter. Besides myself, she is the only other consistent witness to my past - she can fact check me. She might even be a more reliable narrator.
I tell her I recently saw this piece of fabric in an antique store - light leather with little knots all dotted across it, kind of like scabs (sorry, how else do I say that?). Looking at it triggered some type of déjà vu. I asked my mom - yes, apparently we used to have an ottoman with that kind of material (she corrects me: it was faux ostrich leather). It sat in our living room when I was three years old. Another piece of my memory has been successfully saved and cataloged. I can move forward.
I’ve started to think that maybe this habitual state of *dwelling,* this notice of nostalgia’s unrelenting low hum (which seems to permeate every moment, somehow), results from some subconscious reckoning with where I find myself standing now: adulthood.
My childhood met its abrupt end when my dad died in the almost-spring of 2021. I think I would have still felt some lingering effect of kid-hood, even into post-grad, even into marriage, had there not been this sharp halt in my life. I am fatherless. Now I turn the locks, I build the fires. I take care of myself.
In the wake of this new era, I’ve noticed my obsessive safeguarding of what I fear may be slipping. I feel that I must save the parts of me that are endangered. Things are quickly vanishing. Who will tend to the world of my childhood if I let it get overgrown?
A couple of years ago, I got frustrated with my mom after learning that she had thrown out the old Orbit gum wrappers and used floss picks that she had recently found in my dad’s coat pockets. After our call, she dug through the trash and left the scraps in a neat pile on my old desk in my childhood bedroom. They are still sitting there, arranged in the shape of a heart. I couldn’t let the artifacts end up in a landfill. What’s left when everything disappears? Is this delusion or an act of preservation? I don’t know.
I’m currently rereading Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, which I read in college and haven’t revisited until now. The front cover of my paperback is 65% detached and the pages have yellowed. It has that certain smell, you know? I see what I underlined as a 19 year old - the ghost of a past self made apparent with the markings of a black BIC pen.
“Seek what your own everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts, and the belief in some sort of beauty - describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects from your memory. (…)
Even if you were in some prison, would you not still have your childhood, that precious kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories? Turn your attention thither. Try to raise the submerged sensations of that ample past. (…) And if out of this turning inward, out of this absorption into your own world verses come, then it will not occur to you to ask whether they are good verses. (…) a work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity.”
I’m busy making visits to that treasure-house of memories. I’m running through the familiar hallways and memorizing what I see. Don’t make me leave.
Along with reading the letters of a dead poet, I’ve also been rewatching a lot of Greta Gerwig movies recently (which really means I’ve seen three within the past month). And this time, I finally dog-eared that George Eliot quote that Jo reads to Beth, beachside in Little Women. You probably know it - it’s the one that goes:
“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers, (…) What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?”
I’ve known this monotony. I remember so much. I want to follow my nostalgia back to its roots, I want to examine the feeling and ask why it emerges. I’ve started to make lists of the objects that get stuck in my head (the egg shaped alarm clock I had on my bedside in 5th grade, my dad’s green floss picks). I’ve tried taking note of every time I find my subconscious sitting in a specific spot while my thoughts wander aimlessly — last time this happened, I realized my mind was was sitting in my Grandmother’s garden, weeding through the blueberry bushes. Other times I’m standing in my mother’s bathroom, watching light refract in rainbow prisms off of a crystal pendant hanging from the chandelier.
I’ve resolved: I must write about my childhood. Not because it was unique and not even because because I think it’s of any notable importance - but because it’s the beginning of everything I know. It is an intersection of the deeply personal and the deeply familiar. Someday I’ll be in my fifties trying to access the intricate details of my twenties - but today, I’m sitting with my ten year old self. She’s not maintaining good eye contact and she’s more preoccupied thinking about her eraser collection and the boy in Mrs. Smilack’s class.
I can recognize, due to the fact that I keep landing right here at the edge of my childhood - that this has all sprung out of necessity. I will try to trust that the more I turn inward, the more I inspect the memory, the more I will write. And the more I write, the less I will resolve to ask myself whether or not it is good.
I had a professor tell me once, where we devote our attention is where we devote our affection.
I love you. I’m not sure how to write about anything else.
you have my attention
Beautiful! Perfect!