Response: Weird to be you and me
Lying on my back, I watched the clouds pass overhead. It was 1970. I was 6 years old. Oblivious to the deeply philosophical ramifications of what I was about to do, I wondered what was at the edge of those clouds. I knew about the planets. (Although I think Pluto might have been called Planet X then. I just don't know.) But my mind rushed out past the planets. What was beyond them? What was beyond what was beyond them?
I started hyperventilating. Was being in the universe like being in a box? No matter how big a box, there was always something outside the box. Was there another universe outside our universe? I was freaking myself out.
Rolling back onto my stomach, I stared down through the lawn at a bug, trying to think about something else. Another weird thought popped into my head. What if my mother had not married my father? I wouldn't be me! Well, I'd be only half me, but not the me I was at that moment. If it had happened that way, if my parents had married other people, would I as the child of one half of that equation run into the child of the other half of that equation and recognize the part of myself that might have been?
Palms sweating, I sat up and tried to calm down. It's weird to be me, I thought.
This had to be my moment of self-awareness. And, like the Saint, I can remember it in vivid detail. The clouds are still as fluffy, the grass still as scratchy, the bug still as crawly. Periodically, more perplexing and befuddling questions came to mind. But I never talked to my parents about it. I kept it to myself. I already had a reputation as being strange; there was no need to underscore my oddities.
Not long ago, Sport went through the same thing, but instead of keeping it in, he vocalized it.
"Mom, isn't it weird being yourself?"
I knew exactly what he meant. I was thrilled to recognize in him my 6-year-old self. We had a good talk about just how weird it was. I don't think I did or said anything that might have pointed him toward warped ideas or a bizarre religious cult.
Although, if anyone was to be lured away by giddy, tamborine-playing cult members, it would probably be him. And the cult probably would be headed up by Killer.
Labels: self-realization, weirdness
posted by Adjective Queen @ 9:44 PM,
