I Grew Up

 

I grew up a lot. I have memories of growing up. Of marking time as the year I grew up. I grew up in the year I went to high school. I grew up in the year I left that high school for another high school. I grew up when my parents got divorced. I grew up when I found out the reason for my parent’s divorce. I grew up again in the year I truly found out the reason for their divorce.

In the year, my father died I grew up.

In that year, we marked time. We dreamt of Paris. We dreamt of my driver’s license, my marriage and my career. We had big dreams. The spaces around us were small and limited. On the horizon you could see those that had let go of their dreams. Walking listless and jubilant. Shouting greetings and acknowledgments from sunup to sundown. Crowded around something, always something. A ball, a game of draft, a game of something. Life an endless game that they had lost. A game that started from sunup to sundown.

And still, we dreamt, we plotted. I see that now. I didn’t see it then though. In our dreamscape, his wishes of a life lived vicariously through me. A life still to be lived through me. I felt burdened. No longer carefree but shackled with the pressures of growing up. Of time having marched on with me a reluctant tag-along now on the threshold of time and dreams and lives unfulfilled.

We never knew we were out of time. At a breakfast table, our plates overflowing with thin slices of bread and thick layers of margarine. Scrambled eggs piled high, waiting, and ready. In those moments we made short of work of them. He made short of work of them his jaw working furiously his laughing escaping in loud bellows as he laughed out loud at something. I am not sure what, but it was us the two of us at that table. In all my memories there is no one else it is me and him and we dream, or maybe sometimes we reminisce. It is the same.

 

That year he died I grew up. We did not make it to Paris, but we made it past the horizon. He went first and I followed. Looking back, I do not know how I made it past that horizon, with its games and light moments. Nothing is taken seriously. The world was a terrible place, a terrible agony and I was safe here. In these streets with the tar breaking apart. And the houses covered in red dirt that seemed to cling to the roofs, to the windows and to the lines on your face. It settled in and did not leave.

Or maybe it could not leave, when your life is an endless loop of dreams and games it is not the dirt that you have to worry about it’s the hunger that you shield yourself from that occupies. A ceaseless hunger of dreams out of reach dreams unattainable. Dreams lived through the TV you watch. I watched from sunup to sundown as my life moved steadily along. Each day a senseless rhythm of watching waiting, seeing, and knowing that there was no way out. But when he left, there was no need for me to stay.

When he left, I packed everything. Took everything and left so much behind. The friendly neighbour that borrowed and never returned. The clinic I had turned to time and again when I drank paraffin. The boy, my first love. I left so much. I grew up.