Little Black Train

I am sitting in ethnography class listening to a division III radio documentary of a girl who is trying to understand the facets of her father’s death. Is it a mourning tradition for those who lose their father at Hampshire to eternally academically dwell? Are we simply trying to make sense of it?


My final project is forming around perceptions of miscarriage. I assumed it was about birth. I am realizing the opposite. Why am I focusing on the shock of death in the waiting expectation of life?

Experiencing awareness of mortality at Hampshire leads to a specific type of division III. All of us in the club, no matter what we say we are studying, no matter how random and scattered our projects may be from each other, are researching the exact same thing. We are all working on trying to learn how to understand. We cannot move on to the rest of our lives without this knowledge, and I suppose a year long educational thesis is a way to start.

We’re all at different stages. There’s Anna, who cannot get through two sentences on impending death without falling into pain and looking about desperately for somewhere to put the tears. John, who quietly keeps a photo of his father by his bed and doesn’t seem unsettled in these moments until you see his hands. There’s Josephine, whose temperament leaves her with a solemn generalized gaze to the floor and the exploration of pain through the running away from running away.

I look at them and I understand. You can’t know it till you know it. We are all viciously, resentfully, thankfully bonded together by our collective grasps in the dark to not let our pain obscure our lives. Our division III’s are part of that.

I suppose the time has come to discover where I stand.

Shift

I distinctly remember one sunny afternoon when my home still consisted of Rosecroft.

I had wandered into my mothers room as one is want to do when taking a stroll around the house to look at the silence. I remember walking up next to my mother's dressing table where the sun hit the carpet and reaching up to measure the height of the ledge compared to myself. With my arm holding onto the wood that had my mother's touch etched into it, I twisted the rest of myself to look at the full length mirror I was also standing in front of.

I remember peering into my reflection.

I remember sighing in a way that no youth should have knowledge of.

I remember knowing that this is what it meant to be three years old.

I remember that I already missed it.

From the moment my growth chart jumped off the lines, I had been given a vantage pointed promise. Where my father lifted me up is where I would one day stare at eye level. Where my mother stood towering above me, I was promised the possibility of gazing down at the top of her head.

I am sitting here, sprawled five foot ten legged across a chair and a desk.

I am twenty-one and a half years old.

and I will never for the rest of my life forget that appreciation my reflection held in being nothing but young. I knew that I would never have this vantage point again, and I cherished having the stray wisps of hair on my as per usual unkempt head barely reaching the ledge of the desk that my mother sat at every morning in the dark.

It hits me more often than it should. Sitting in a coffee shop on a Thursday afternoon reading and once again positioned in the spot where the sun hits the floor, I already miss it.

Driving down an unknown country road with the sun on my face listening to rock and roll to clear my head of young worries, I already miss it.

Perhaps this is why I love the sun. It has been my constant companion in these silent moments of mourning what I have not yet lost.

I suppose it wouldn't have it any other way.