Prologue

Today, I've been thinking about how there was a time when I was serious about being a legitimately productive writer. It wasn't so long ago, really. (Actually, I guess the truth is, that was nearly 12 months ago now, but it's a scary realization that I've been gone from Carver for that many minutes, hours, days.) Anyway, at the end of my senior year, I had resolved to complete a series of personal essays about my childhood - a collection with some real solidarity was the goal. Well, I turned out about half a dozen, I think, and then the summer arrived, and when it was over, I dragged myself to college, and for a long while I felt entirely too displaced to start crafting again, until eventually I forgot altogether why it was ever so important to me in the first place. But with second semester, I found myself stripped down again, returning to that primordial state, rushing back to what I knew, what was familiar, what I could remember: writing. 

I'd like to take the time to awaken those dormant essays, so I've drafted a prologue to the potential memoir to try and keep myself rooted in this goal. (This probably makes it appear as though I take my own writing far too seriously, but please know that this is more of an exercise to keep me invested in my work than it is some overblown dream of having a book to pack away and send off to publishers.) 

Prologue

The memories of my childhood are fragmented sentences – they flit into view like hummingbirds hungry for nectar and fly away even faster than they came. I have tried, in these essays, to link clauses to the incomplete memories, to make them whole, complete. 

I can recall clearly my first sips of embarrassment, how they made me feel clumsy and fumbling like a drunk: the time I ran full force into the sliding glass doors at my aunt’s townhouse during a summer barbeque, the instances when my parents argued like thunder and lightning when I had friends over to play, and the time my mother took me to a shop full of dolls in old Ellicott City. I can only remember one of the collectables in that store – the faces and clothes of the others are as lost to me now as the names of all the children in my kindergarten class. I can see that doll now, perched in her wooden crib, silver locket dangling within the ruffles of her lacy dress. The necklace may as well have been dripping with diamonds – to me, it was as glittering and glamorous as jewelry purchased at Tiffany & Co. I stretched my hand out towards the locket, moving slowly, building up to the moment when my fingers would feel the etchings on the heart’s surface. But before I could touch it, the man behind the counter saw me and said, “Do not. Touch. Anything,” and everyone in that one-room store turned to look at me. My whole body smoldered, the fire spreading quickly from my face to my heart and all my extremities, and I wished I would burn down to an ash small enough to fit inside that doll’s locket. 

It seems that adults don’t always understand that children experience emotion as intensely as grown-ups, and that, in some ways, as a child, the feelings are even more vivid – as bold and bright as the primary colors. When embarrassment and humiliation seep into the skin of a child, she is not braced to console herself. As a little girl, I possessed no internal mother cooing and comforting me when something went wrong. Instead, I fixated on the event, unable to release what had happened, unwilling to stop mentally reprimanding myself. 

But not all of the memories are constructed around those times I understood what shame felt like: I can recall the excitement of unwrapping a doll on Christmas and pulling her around in my new blue sled all afternoon; the time, in a fit of anger, I threw our old dictionary down the stairs at my father and the pages fell out in clumps; and the nervousness I felt when our red-headed golden retriever ran away and was nowhere to be found in the neighborhood. I have set out to write about my childhood before I forget all of these snapshots, before I no longer know what it feels like to be a child, before I morph into one of the adults who are unable to crawl back into the mindset of a young girl. These essays are my way of safeguarding all that I experienced growing up, my way of fondly protecting my memories like a mother hen does her eggs.