Consider what you were, back before things had names, back when pointing was your native tongue. Consider this you, covered in baby fat in very tiny shoes in a very large world. Sure, you had bouts of illness and soccer games and elementary school calendars to put tiny little ledges in your memory to hold onto, but you’re not inclined towards that. Not yet anyways.
Consider the few memories you have left from there, maybe you don’t know which came first. Maybe you don’t know if you remember them, but you’ve heard the stories so many times it doesn’t matter. You don’t remember much before the divorce, just Poptarts with faces drawn on them, a big spider on the window, your dad pulling what seemed like a hundred Band-Aids off of the itchy bumps that covered your body. You remember a mouthwash that tasted like bubble gum that had a secret agent on the front, you remember drinking a Mott’s juice box at the neighbor’s, you remember seeing an owl on the sidewalk, fried beneath the electrical lines.
Consider that you were once there, just as present as you are now. You can’t really understand that, though. What it means to think in any other way than how you’re doing it at this moment.
Consider that someway, somehow, you are estranged from yourself. If you didn’t know that you were once a kid, you’d never believe it. Sure, you’ve been here the whole time, but the then and the now is much too different to make sense of. Little you is a character, just like teenage you is, just like you’ll be soon. With enough time, everything you’re feeling right now will sublimate into a memory or two, all the shame and remorse and ideation will fade into stories that begin with Back Whens or One Times.
Consider where you’re at. Consider that at some point, it’ll be like you were never here, just like the little you isn’t here in any other way but factually. Consider if that makes you feel any better.
jeez, louise 