Life is Short

This story is © copyrighted to Adrienne Wolter in 2005 and onwards. It was written on September 4th, 2004. Do not take this story.

This story is a memoir, and thus, autobiographical. I wrote it on September 4th, 2004 as an entry into DoaSO (it was probably also a writing exercise specifically for transitions, I forget, but I think I did a great job with them, ha ha!); in November I went back, changed it the smallest bit, and decided it was a nice enough piece to submit to 2004-5 Scholastic Writing Awards. It won a gold key.

Having won a gold key in regionals, it proceeded onto nationals, where it also won a gold.

Life is Short

I've said before that I have a weird memory. I see flashes of my past or what could be my past, never really sure, when I hear music or see specific things. Seeing things... there's a mountainside that's never grown grass that reminds me of car crashes and accidents and death. There's a bridge that reminds me of the time I first realized, at the age of five or six, I couldn't have yet been in school yet, that reincarnation makes sense to me. When I see that bridge, I think about a relative whose face I've seen but I never talked to, who made a ceramic jack-o-lantern for Grammy. The pumpkin's been sitting above the mirrored cabinets in my grandpa's home since before I was born.
There's a somewhat gnarly tree on the edge of the yard between the sand mound and the farmer's field which reminds me of summers with kitten Tiggy, a turkey we must have had at one point, baby chickens; bags and bags, mountains of garbage bags of leaves. I was so small then, and those leaves might not have been so many as I remember, but what I remember is twenty feet high, and from the top I felt like I was on top of the world, looking down at ants. I really looked down at ant-people, dressed in a rather uncomfortable dress, up in one of the World Trade Centers, curiously looking out at a huge statue, the Statue of Liberty, as behind me, my Grandfather Arnie's retirement party commenced. "They look like ants, don't they?" a passing secretary said, the same who had pointed out the huge statue to me. She'd then gone down the elevator. Floor sixty-six. Floor sixty-six? That's the number stuck in my head. I remember huge flags in the lobby. I remember a horror-stricken worry in the sixth grade as planes hit the towers, and I worried about my grandfather before I realized that he'd already retired.
Things just connect, and unless I write them out as I think them–which is almost impossible, the process is ten times as fast as I can type–I don't really understand how I came to remember what I'm remembering. There's a school bus in Mt. Holly that's never been moved, or maybe it moves every day but it's always back when we pass it. When we pass it, usually coming from behind, the back has a reflective square that shines back at us, and I remember a spinning ball going down a very large tower, a countdown one minute long to midnight, fifty-nine, fifty-eight--
Sometimes it worries me, though, how stuck in memories I am. I cannot seem to stay in the present. I know what feeling sentimental feels like, and it's the same feeling as when you look out the window at the seasons you missed, and when only yesterday there had been a bright, shiny sun and layers of flowers, there are now layers of leaves. Layers of brown and orange leaves, coloring in the child's drawing, a zigzag of neon green for grass, a few blobs meant to be flowers. Look what I drew, mom! And a soft that's nice dear and then the image fades from memory, forgotten. Because for the minutes it took to draw, perhaps it took two, perhaps it took twenty, it is forgotten in seconds as the child finds something new to occupy her.
Christmases in New Jersey. The Joy-woman, but maybe her name wasn't Joy at all, maybe it was Betty or Pat, or--no, I don't think it was any of them. Those are my mother's coworkers' names. But she had dark, short hair and brown eyes and the more I try to remember who she was, the less I can recall.
I guess I was really young then. Had to have been nine, ten years ago.
The day we got Lightning. The first dog I can remember–though there had to have been some before that, and I certainly cannot remember the two rabbits, who escaped and died on Easter. I remember dad taking down their fence after they jumped it. They lived outside, must have been easy enough for them to jump over the chicken wire. Summers, no, summers and springs and falls and winters, spent playing the magic tree warrior game, elderly Tiggy following me patiently, making sure I was always in her sight as she sat at a distance, licking her paw. She got so bad so gradually, and we all loved her, and she loved us all. She started drooling much worse that summer. Couldn't close her mouth. Tumor. They couldn't cut it out. It was either put her to sleep or let her suffer. But we didn't want her to die that way–and yet, we had no idea that she would keep hurting for months. Summer was wrapping up, and the kitty Floyd appeared in mum's work's parking lot, staying for days and going home with no one who intended to take him to the pound. Finally, mum opened her car door, told him, "Come on, we're goin' home," and he jumped right in and sat on her lap the whole way home. Tigger taught him in less than four months what she had done for years - where to catch the mice, where to sit and watch cars pass, how to leave paw prints up the windshields. And then she died, but she lived on in Floyd.
But that was the past, that was 2000, four years ago, and I still hurt from the fact that all living things die. It's an overwhelming world and a short life, and I can't be living in what I can never have back.