It took me a long time to figure out what had happened
It was before I was born but I was alive . . . 105 days waiting to be born
look at the international dateline west to east Tuesday becomes Monday
. . . Syracuse . . . New York Summer . . . 1945 . . . and a memory that haunted me for years about a moment in that day or night and what happened on a carrier out in the Pacific
I didn’t understand it . . . but it happened to me too
Made up from stories I’d heard or real a flash of experience from him to me either way I remembered the instant of the wound that death that took all night dragged on then ended my uncle’s life
. . . my grandmother said she woke up with a splitting headache that lasted all night . . . when the headache went away she knew her son was dead
. . . my father, the older brother, thought “It should have been me.”
Maybe I absorbed that too.
I was born on a Monday at the end of October West to East . . . Tuesday becomes Monday
One summer night when I was 19, I woke with a vision And, after that, I began to believe “This is my last year.”
Odd thoughts for a young man “Why am I alive?” “I’m supposed to be dead.” “Why?” . . . “This year, then, will be the year I die.”
Ignored; forgotten . . . felt
Deep inside me . . . year after year
When I first remembered what had happened it was a memory of something that had actually happened to me whirling blades, closer and closer; hitting, cutting
It was real and it happened again I screamed and screamed
Elinor was there we’d pulled out two other buried, frozen memories I’d learned the mistakes a child’s mind can make and lock inside real facts, re-felt understood differently no longer hopeless brought out forgiven seen accepted put back in a different way healing
But this, the most terrible memory, remained a mystery What had happened? What did it mean?
Much later . . . it seemed to finally come together A question from me “Where did that memory about the cutting blades come from?”
Some odd rituals . . . a trance . . . a possibility A call and a revelation.
When I heard the date of his death I felt like I knew what had happened I thought
“The memory was real.” “Somehow . . . for some reason as he received the wound that killed him he reached out and found me in the womb.”
West to east Somewhere inside I stopped believing “You’re not supposed to be alive.” Somewhere inside, I started breathing
Now, even later . . . Monday October 18 Tuesday October 19 out there
and . . . I don’t know
But however it happened
I remembered
It happened to me too