This is the part of the memory that feels like drowning. I had three hours until dinner. Three hours until my dad came home and asked, "What did you do today?"
I had no answer.
We look at photos from 1991 now—the baggy jeans, the bad haircuts, the boxy sedans—and we laugh. We call it "low resolution." But the resolution wasn't low. The anxiety was low.
There is a specific Wednesday in the autumn of 1991 that I am convinced no one else remembers. I couldn’t tell you the date on the calendar—October 16th, perhaps, or the 23rd. The days bled into one another back then. But I remember the weight of that Wednesday. The smell of a mimeograph machine in a damp hallway. The specific drone of a fluorescent light. The way the world felt both suffocatingly small and terrifyingly infinite.
This is the part of the memory that feels like drowning. I had three hours until dinner. Three hours until my dad came home and asked, "What did you do today?"
I had no answer.
We look at photos from 1991 now—the baggy jeans, the bad haircuts, the boxy sedans—and we laugh. We call it "low resolution." But the resolution wasn't low. The anxiety was low.
There is a specific Wednesday in the autumn of 1991 that I am convinced no one else remembers. I couldn’t tell you the date on the calendar—October 16th, perhaps, or the 23rd. The days bled into one another back then. But I remember the weight of that Wednesday. The smell of a mimeograph machine in a damp hallway. The specific drone of a fluorescent light. The way the world felt both suffocatingly small and terrifyingly infinite.