Short fiction: “Buried Girl Transmission №2”
I would love to know why certain short stretches in a person’s youth loom larger and more vibrantly over the rest of their days compared to later periods that are more eventful, dramatic, or meaningful. Why are some fleeting moments, though taken for granted at the time, remembered later on as an improbable flower that never stops blooming, even though life at the time had felt like a desert, or even an endless dark hallway? Why do I keep forgetting how miserable I had been back then? More to the point, why have I missed that misery in the ensuing years as if it had been the sweetest sort of pain? Why do I feel so strongly about that particular time of my life but not others? And of all places for me to spend my vacation, why am I returning here, this town where they extract salt from a river flowing with tears instead of water?
Much of what you’re talking about can be reduced to a simple matter of timing. In childhood, we see the world in shades of exploding technicolor, hear the music in everything, including cacophony and silence itself, and feel emotions as overlapping extremes, sometimes complementary, sometimes conflicting, but always alive, ferociously alive. In adulthood we surrender to rationalism, and make virtues of disbelief and detachment. In other words, we settle into the serious business of waiting around to die, while simultaneously pushing against…
