a boat

Yes, at the risk of sounding melodramatic, I want to say that for me this is the story of a loss of innocence. Not of the obvious kind.  The hardest thing about this particular loss of innocence was feeling that I was completely alone in it, unable to speak. That, and the feeling that there was nothing to be learned from all of this.

No, in this – where was the lesson? Was the lesson that anything I could ever do could be construed as careless, as dangerous? That an action as simple as laying my coat across a chair in the house of a friend could unknowingly change my life? What was there to learn in finding that something as ordinary as owning furniture or going to sleep at night could land me in bankruptcy? How could the knowledge that living a normal life – free of behavior one could only describe as obsessive-compulsive, work to somehow make me a better person, a stronger one, somehow wiser?

I see the innocence, of course, now, in the everyday habits that people take for granted. An action, in the dark, as simple as sinking down for several hours into the plush seats of a movie theater.

But I find particularly painful the recollection of two particular images – two memories of an innocence I wished to get back.

Number one: it is a chilly day of either spring or fall. My memory is limited, such that really it could be either; however, I am convinced by the hope contained in that memory, by the feeling of endless possibility – or no, perhaps not even that, for perhaps there is an innocent lack of even the need for possibility or a future – that it is spring, that everything is somehow waxing, not waning. I am probably four years old. Perhaps my siblings are around, perhaps not; I am immersed in my own green and rainy outdoor universe. 

I have made a boat. Out of what, I no longer remember. Perhaps a leaf. Perhaps some portion of an egg carton; I don't recall. I do not particularly remember how well my boat stayed afloat or how well it moved. It does not seem to have mattered. It seems only that that boat did something that, for the four-year-old girl that I was, a boat was supposed to do – and that this made me deeply happy. I believe, looking back, that I was probably only a block from home – but wherever it was, I felt very far away. Far, but not scared. Not the least bit scared.
 

And then there was the day I brought all of my stuffed animals out onto the front lawn. At least, it felt like a lawn – the small, bumpy patch of sparse grass and dirt in front of that run-down house we'd rented. I was four years old, and the world felt like a big place – but not in that way that made me feel like the universe was utterly indifferent. Not like now, when it seemed I could live the rest of my life this way and die alone like this – when I felt I was just part of the large, ordered, impersonal web of nature.