Yesterday, wanting to expand my writing into the realm of non-fiction (which I have long kept at a dispassionate distance) I grabbed my notebook and sat down outside to try and write something.

Below is what came out of that, which I have tentatively titled: Interrupted Reminiscence.


I’m sitting outside in the sun, breeze tickling and birds singing. I uncap my pen without knowing, or caring, what I’ll write, but creative urges dictate that I will write something. Vague feelings of nostalgia and childish remembrance have been bouncing around my head all morning, so I start with something fittingly relevant.

Summer is what comes to mind when I think of my childhood. As brief as summer may be in the suburbs of this small city of perpetual motion, this perennially placid fish’s head, summer is inextricably linked with childhood in my mind. Summer and—

A man in the distance breaks my concentration, his weed eater, which had been droning on in the distance, suddenly dies.

“Oh this fahckin’ thing!” he cries out in frustration, voice carried on the interminable breeze. The neighbourhood dogs take up his cry with misplaced excitement.

Summer and colours are directly associated with childhood for me. I often say that I don’t remember my childhood, but what memories I do have are tinted with the warm rosy-orange of bricks glowing in the afternoon sun, the thick sea green of ever-shifting depth, and the bright porcelain gleam of shadeless blue, deep and pure and cutting—

The weed eater starts up again in the distance.

Such is the palette of my childhood.

I don’t remember my childhood, though I am aware of the space it used to occupy in my memory; of large sections of general contentment that have since been paved over and built upon. In that space, a brand new reservoir, already filling with viscous knowledge.

I may not remember my childhood, but I do feel it. Feelings and glimpses and flashes of sight, sound, taste, and smell.

The sight of a CD-ROM, iridescent in the sunlight.

The sound of cicadas, a soporific summer drone.

The taste of Raro, powdered Pineapple, Sweet Mandarin, and dusty Lemonade.

The smell of chlorine, pool water drying upon bared skin.

These flashes and bursts of feeling are too—

The weed eater cuts out again.

“Fahck!”

These flashes of feeling are too primal to be considered conscious memory, and too indistinct to be of certain authenticity.

I don’t remember my childhood, and why should I? If there is one thing that I am certain of, it is that my childhood was suitably and contentedly boring, as the past should be. It is, after all, in the present where interest lies, for only in the present can the unexpected occur.

The weed eater does not start again, but soon afterward comes the sound of frustrated hammering.