I have decided that I will write my memoir in short installments, and that I will post them here, to whet the public’s appetite while I wait for a publisher to sign me. So, without further ado, here’s a sneak peak at,

MY WAKING NIGHTMARE
22 Years of Laughter and Love

by Adam

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Year 8

Father moved us into a much smaller house when he lost his job in the consolate. We had to pack everything into crates and tie them together on the back of a truck with ropes. I remember mother didn’t speak to the moving men, not even when they asked her whether which crates ought not to be stacked. Almost all of the furniture had to be sold, and many of the dishes and pictures and some of my toys. Mother gave some of her dresses to charity, father gave some of his suits. When all of that had been done, everything fit on to one truck, with room at the back for the men to sit on and smoke cigarettes.

We drove behind the truck on the way to the new house, and I watched the crates bounce up and down stiffly. When mother unpacked the dishes, many of them were broken.

Family would stop by the house to encourage us, and in the beginning, some of father’s old friends from the consulate would come by in the afternoon and sit for a cup of coffee in front of the fire, but I began to hate their visits when I saw that they were infrequent and uncomfortable to both parties, and when they one day ceased altogether, none of us was, I think, particularly set back.

Mother, father and I brooded in the house almost every night. Father read, mother sewed, and I laid on the carpet and listened to the clock. Sometimes, I saw one or the other of my parents staring off at nothing, as if in a trance, and it seemed to me that their body was actually uninhabited. Whenever we moved from our places, to eat food or to clean up after ourselves, it was out of duty, not hunger or pride. What we felt could only manifest in mutual silence, and so besides the empty banter of every day affairs, we didn’t speak to each other often. This, I thought, was best, for I saw in their exhaustion that mother and father shared exactly my sense of dread and awe, and, taking after them, I quietly began to learn how to see the world as adults do.

Once, my father said: “A farmer’s dog has a litter, and there are too many puppies to keep, so the farmer takes the puppies to the pond and, one by one, holds them under water until they drown. The puppy is too young and too primitive to know why the farmer is suffocating it, and too weak to resist. He only knows that it is cold, unjust, and insurmountable. Son, the world is the pond, and you, and I, and everyone else, what are we?”

***

Ok, that’s all for today. Tomorrow, a bit from my crazy years at college, including the story of how my Sigma Chi brothers and I stole the rival school’s mascot the night of the Homecoming game, and how this led me to denounce all religion and attempt suicide.