Childish Mind

Long ago, we lived in a house. That is to say, when I say we I mean in the first-person plural sense; collectively, you and I. That said, while some may be contented to stay in one place for years, decades, perhaps their entire lives, a vast number of people would prefer a change of scenery. A different sky, a different roof under which to languish. For that is how our minds, so childish, so ambivalent, function.

Always looking ahead, rarely wandering back over familiar ground.

But what is remembered by our juvenile minds? A mismatched image of a dappled sun eclipsing a field of emeralds that could be a garden? A shimmer; a gleam of the Summer breeze, personified of course, scarcely felt as it wafts lazily across every grass stem, rippling through the green tide like an ocean wave. Woven trellises of forget-me-nots, or maybe rhododendrons or hyacinths, overshadowed utterly by a foreboding wall of ashlar and mortar that could pass for the rear of a house. No? Something else perhaps.

An interior, maybe? Memories long buried like cadavers beneath a thick layer of dirt, fated to become the foundation for new life; newer, better memoirs, budding like flowers. Or fond ones, easily reminisced about the time we tried to do a hand-stand in the lounge only to lose our balance and crash headlong – or rather, feet-long – into that potted plant, dribbling soil across the fresh carpet much to a loving mother’s exasperation. No? How about this then:

Recollections perhaps of mockeries, of machinations from those maladjusted figures we remember, influenced by a bottle or a narcotic substance. Pain, anguish, sobbing ourselves quietly into a fitful nightmare that could only be worsened by us having to wake up. Our mind wavering at every instant of those beatings on the brink of a fine precipice, threatening a descent into madness, of a fevered reality. No again?

Hum. You’re not making this easy. For sure, one might say you’re being quite childish.

Let me throw some idea out to the wind then:

A party, recalled in batches of explosions of neon lights, flashing spots against our eyes, laced with visions from alcohol, as they tried to make sense of the picture before them: of dancing bodies and a raucous melody. The hangover that followed serving as a lesson, a mistake we may or may not have learned from.

A school yard, that fist, whether ours or theirs, striking home to spatter a bloody swathe against the concrete floor, a rosy mist falling across our eyes as a cadence of screams and yelling thrums on the edge of our hearing. For only through an aimless animosity could we understand the juxtaposition of true kindness.

A wedding, be us groom or bride, waves of love and desire filling us like whiskey in a flask, threatening to make us burst at any moment as we watch our dearly beloved come striding towards us down the aisle. How something so beautiful can exist, we might ponder. By finding the true beauty within.

Any luck? No?! Hum.

Well maybe it doesn’t matter what our particular memory was. What matters is the message it conveys.

These moments of rapture, of sorrow, of hatred; emotions so quickly lapsing they are over in a heartbeat. These memories passing before our eyes, our childish mind, which shape us and make us who we are, and yet are so easily forgotten. Too effortlessly disremembered.

Our silly, naïve and innocent human mindedness. Always looking ahead, towards another sky so far away.

Yet rarely focusing on the now, and what we leave behind.