Belly of the Whale

Rare image of self

While talking about autobiographical writing in class, we thought about how, when writing about home, often it is portrayed as a place that no longer exists, a place that in some sense we ourselves don’t fit into anymore, we’ve outgrown the rooms of our childhood.

The idea absorbed me for a little while: I imagined myself as a grizzled and hardened old man, a man that has now come to know pain, loss, love, sacrifice, death, suffering, glory, and maybe something of life; I imaged this old figure, grey and a bit stooped, standing by my bed in what is now called my mom’s room, but it was my first room and my last. I felt like I entered the mind and imagination of this old man, and I could feel the distance and the absurd gap between the reality of his life and choices and the innocence of myself as a boy growing into myself in that house, room, and bed. It wasn’t so much the years that separated the two as much as it was the sensibility, the inner growth.

The dichotomy between the innocence and experience, between my memory of youth and my dream of the future—all present in an image of an old man by my old bed, a bed that looked just the way it does now, or the way I remember it being, but won’t be forever.