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Summer Nights On The Overpass

Published by
Traverse
 in memory. 0 Comments

Standing on the overpass that night, watching the occasional car speed along the two-lane country highway below us, we felt infinite. Larger than life. Just three kids in our Sunday best with rolled up sleeves and loosened ties, illuminated by nothing but the pale glow of the full summer moon.

We never wanted that night to end. We wanted it to last forever. But tomorrow would bring big changes for us all, and we knew it. After years of talk of leaving this town, it was finally going to happen. Tomorrow Kyle would move off to a university, tearing our life-long trio apart. Of course there would still be John and I, but we both knew things would never be the same.

John set another empty beer bottle on the bumper of my car. He was starting to feel a bit tipsy. We all were. We hoped the alcohol would soften the pain of change.

None of us spoke, but we were all thinking the same thing. We were afraid. Afraid of change. Afraid of growing up. We didn’t want things to change. We didn’t want that summer to end. We wanted to stay young forever, living without the responsibilities of adults, but still having the independence to party every night and drink until we passed out.

But that night did end, as we knew it would. Kyle went to school and moved on to bigger and better things than us and our town and those nights spent drinking and talking of dreams, hopes, and whatever else came up on that overpass. I hear he’s married and has a kid now.

Eventually I stopped hearing from John, too. I found him passed out on the overpass, surrounded by broken glass. I took him back to his home, then learned he had died of alcohol poisoning that night. I wrote Kyle about it but never heard back. He wasn’t even at the funeral.

I wish I could relive that summer where the three of us stood so tall and strong against the world, walking through the streets like owned the town, staying awake for days on end and drinking ourselves to sleep and waking to a nasty hangover. We knew everyone and everyone knew us. That summer was the climax of our lives.

I still pass by that overpass occasionally, and I still see the three of us standing there together, ready to face the world, side by side.

Traverse

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To know someone

Published by
Nicole
 in memory. 0 Comments

You can’t choose when you get the chance to know someone.

When I knew my gran, my cousins and I were amazed by the way she could blow cigarette smoke out of her ears. We were fascinated by how she could remember the names of all the plants in the world and even remember the names of all the weeds. She was magical!

We used to sit on her living room couch, all of the pillow covers she had knitted, and the house smelled of hokey-pokey cookies and settled like only a gran’s house can.

She’d print out a sheet from the computer with rows of dots on it and we would connect one dot to another with really sharp pencils, trying not to draw a box. She looked after us just liked she looked after my dad and my uncle I suppose.

She slowly lost her memory and could no longer remember what happened the day before. Partly because of her practical approach to things and partly because she was afraid of losing her mind, she would write everything down. Her scientific training served her well.

As my brother and I stood at each side of her bed, about 12 hours before she died, not knowing what to say or do, my Gran reached out and took in each of her hands one of ours. She remembered that she loved us and we knew that we loved her.

It doesn’t matter when I had the chance to know my gran or even what I remember in the end. All that matters is that once, I did.

Nicole

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A little bit of death

Published by
Dalarius
 in memory. 0 Comments

I think back now, to a memory that for some reason seems incredibly insignificant, but I know for a fact that it is more significant that I expect, possibly because anything like this that happens to a twelve year old will most likely effect the rest of his or her life. There I was sitting with my mother in the living room, watching a movie. The walls are the color of dried blood, sponged over white to give it a neat textured look, the lamp on the side table just off the right side of the couch (while seated) has a beige lamp with the plastic wrap still on the cone of it. I cannot recall the movie, but the TV is sitting in a large TV cabinet wood and fold aside shutter doors with the center pieces painted black. The decorations of the room fallow a definite western theme, complete with live cacti and cowboy boot pictures. As is usual the phone rings without warning and my mother answers it. She greets the person on the phone in a happy bubbly type of voice. After a few moments she starts laughing, the manner of which I know to be hysterically, and she repeats over and over again “Your joking” “Your kidding right?”. This went on for a few minutes before she said goodbye and see you soon to the person on the phone. Then she told me that her boyfriend Trev had been in a motorcycle accident and was dead. Then she said she had to go and see his family, and she left. Well after seeing her laughing and saying that the person on the phone was joking, I possibly naturally thought that she was joking. So she left, and I finished watching the movie that we had started. After a few hours I started to worry that maybe something had happened to delay her, but she came back eventually, drunk as I later found out. I wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral of Trev, which is rather unfortunate as I never really got to say farewell to somebody I had known for years. I was never really affected by that death, I was very close with the man but it just never touched me in any way. I have since encounter death a few times, with relatives, and a friends, the only time it has really meant anything to me was when a fifteen year old boy I used to babysit died. It seems like such a tremendous loss of life, when an uncle who I used to spend every summer with died though, I only felt bad for my father who had lost one of his brothers. I don’t know weather this event is the key to my not really being concerned with death in adults, or if there’s some other reason behind it . Anyway though that’s one of my brief meetings with death. I suppose I will eventually post more, it seems to me that this would be a good place to remember people who have died. Till another time friends.

Dalarius

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Feeling of being human

Published by
boris kislitsin
 in void space. 2 Comments

In 1687 Sir Isaac Newton published Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which laid the foundation of determinism. Through Newton’s ideas in what we call now the Age of Reason, rose the idea of ”clockwork universe”, generally stating that by measuring things as they are, we can accurately explain all the Nature’s phenomenae and predict the future using the laws of science.

 One probably could wonder, what does Newton’s work has to do with my memories. Though I haven’t read the original and was born nearly 300 years later, it had a certain impact on me. As a matter of fact, we perceive reality and interpret it through the prism of our cultural and educational background. It’s never “as it is”, but as worthy as it’s description. My father was a strong believer in science, and wanted me to be a mathematician, a kind of a weird wish keeping in mind he was a poet himself. I remember him trying to come up with a precise word, which could describe what he felt at the moment best. He often felt stressed about it as  he couldn’t. I guess he thought it is easier to operate with numbers rather than words. I remember refusing going to my 1st grade in school: I demanded science. I wanted to study physics and maths, I wanted to understand the mechanics of existence. That’s why my parents have sent me to a school with advanced maths and science programs,  and determinism was what they taught in school too.

My belief in numbers was ruined after I’ve read at the age of 12 some popular books on astronomy and quantum mechanics: it turned out that, with the course of time any system behaviour starts to “fluctuate” and become disordered, behaving randomly. Even orbits of planets, massive bodies, never quite follow the same path. We live in a universe which is rather chaotic, then orderly. Our brain waves,  or the pattern of it’s electric impulses, is also being chaotic. This could be the origin of consciousness , free will and creativity. Our mind is ruled rather by Chaos, then Order. Continue reading ‘Feeling of being human’

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