The man who taught me how to fish killed himself on Easter morning. It's not typically my style to use tragedy as a prop for my writing, but my mind has been consumed by thoughts of him since I heard the news. Gandy was my neighbor, the former mayor of my town, a larger-than-life character whose official death announcement included an anecdote about the time he killed an 800-pound wild hog. He was a grinning, moustached hell of a guy who once shot a venomous snake right in front of me and his daughter, who was my childhood friend. Suddenly my seven-year-old life is vivid and at the forefront of my ever-rushing flood of thoughts. Memories of the smell of their beautiful Victorian house are distinct and immediate when I close my eyes. I can hear his voice telling me to keep slowly reeling in the line, wait for a nibble, learn patience. I can remember climbing trees in other people's backyards with his daughter. The past seems so tangible, so full-bodied and present. All at once I feel as if I've gained some otherworldly access to a life I've lost my childhood.
Perhaps this is a preemptive mourning of the loss that is to come with graduation. Perhaps this is a selfish usurpation of an event so much more objectively significant than my residual desperation to recover the comfortable familiarity of childhood. I've been in a rut since I found out. I've been eating ramen and having dreams about shooting guns. Although those who knew Gandy might think such dreams are related to him (the day his daughter was born, he bought her a pink rifle that pretty much sums him up), I actually used to have stress dreams about shooting guns in high school too. I suspect it's ejaculation envy. Or maybe sodium pseudo-overdoses. I started a secret Tumblr to record the thoughts that overcrowd my mind and stifle my focus. I tweet when I'm lonely. I'm writing this column at 4:30 a.m.
But there's also something redemptive about having these childhood memories so thoroughly and vividly resurrected in my mind: I've regained a genuine sense of my childhood mindset. Suddenly I remember what mattered to me at age seven finding four-leaf clovers, climbing to the top of the magnolia tree, feeling always limitless because I was not yet self-aware. After all, self-awareness is the death knell of real confidence, or being completely fine with wearing Adidas sandals, a pink lace choker, a tie-dyed T-shirt and a tutu in public (Note: Being on a Croo doesn't count. It's easy to look like an idiot in a group).
Sometimes I wonder if there isn't something more real, more sacred, in the simple ignorance of childhood. Intellectualizing the world has only defamiliarized it, has made it a cold, dissected fish. I am downright sick with questions. I let my calendar drive my daily pursuits. I care about all the wrong things, and it is only in the middle of the night when listening to the rain that I remember how eternal the world outside my life is, and how fleeting everything within it is. I miss the days when, after every meal I finished at a restaurant, I immediately put my head in my mother's lap and went to sleep. I miss the animal in me. I want to see the leaves turning brown and not know why. I want to wonder again.
I suppose I am being melodramatic, and I admit it. There are still things to wonder about, ways to find moments that matter. I have relatively very little to grieve over, given all that I have and how little I've lost. But each day I wake up means a yesterday I've lost, and each birthday stands as a testament to the existence of an eventual final sum, round and definite. Each time another year is piled on, it reminds us painfully of what we're counting towards, the way "no"s turn into "yes"s the more you say them. When you must repeat yourself, "No, no, no, no, no, no," it inevitably dawns on you that you are merely staving off what will come eventually, the erosion of will, the slow melting of acceptance. Birthdays are the no that imply the yes.
Thoughts like these remind me why competition is so innately silly. Nobody ever wins, really, unless you count a good obituary as a win. If we're so wrapped up in reaching concrete goals and passing all the important checkpoints, we distort the very nature of life, that slow and easy motion of sun into moonlight and back again, that drive of curiosity unfettered by the demands of a syllabus or a schedule, all those countless simple pleasures, that patient line in the water, ever hopeful but always unassuming.
The time-tethered mind is rigidly isolated from the visceral life of the body. There is a certain serenity in the acceptance of our impermanence, allowing us to ground our lives in what we instinctively know is far more meaningful than those artificially constructed measures of success by which we are told to evaluate our worth.