Childhood Memory 1

Kids rebel from the beginning. We're born fighting and squirming and vying for survival, falling from one small trauma to the next. As elders we try to allow children space to learn from their failures, although their boundaries fluctuate and collapse so erratically that it's impossible to avoid stepping over them at every turn. We push on with these unintended violations for the benefits of the otherwise overwhelming nurturing that comes with caring parenting, and the children push on in all directions, developing their little egos and working out how to get attention, how to command their environment, how to assert themselves in this world of power and authority.

i couldn't stay and face it,

i needed to flee

and she let me run.

i broke up the stairs in despair,

light pushing through a veil of tears.

i must have been 6 or 7

and i still remember the searing bitterness of it.

Into my room i fell

with a face full of diffracted light,

objects coming into focus for moments at a time.

Adrenaline fingers rolled

over the soft spines of my paperback books

and the minute, acrylic architecture of my room.

With a cluttered oesophagus,

i heaved the hot-sour air

into my tiny little lungs.

i grasped wildly

for objects i could claim to own

and found

an elaborate Lego structure

i had arranged earlier.

Somehow it represented

the summation of my cognitive abilities

– the pinnacle

of my blocky engineering achievements. 

i crushed it in my hands,

letting out a wail as i did,

feeling it crumble beneath my grip

as i wrung out the hours of concentration i had invested

in making it whole.

It broke my heart but i had to do it.

i was angry and frustrated.

My body was alive

with the hormones of fight or flight.

i threw myself into bed;

into the spongy mattress of textiles

that would absorb so much energy

over the years to come.

i recognise this now

as some kind of nascent self-harm:

as a desperate way of leaving my mark

in a world i found so difficult to assert myself in.

i also remember the reflection;

a second wave of sadness;

having got the hot slug out of my belly.

i could feel the burn,

from where it had left,

and i lay there for an hour or so

as the hormones drained away

and my sympathetic neurons stopped firing.

i lay and contemplated the chaos

of my tiny universe,

struggling to make sense of it all
struggling to understand why
i had just done what i had

It's in these moments

that personalities are formed,

as emotions and thoughts

churn milk

into butter.