My First Memorable Memory

Why do I remember you?

Fear. To this day you're still the most intense fear I have ever known, not because you were out of my control, but because you were out of the control of my parents. They could do nothing, and knowing this created my violent fear of you. Those protectors, those idolized figures who had never failed me, were also in fear, in pain, and at a loss for what to do.

My dad was on top of me. I think he was telling me everything would be ok but I couldn't hear him. You wouldn't allow me to hear him.

I could hear the screaming of my sister down the hall. The screaming intermingled with the sound of...well, I don't know how to describe you. I suppose I could try and relate you to an elevated train in downtown Manhattan. Residential owners know what it's like to hear the train speed by, right outside their window, at 2:00 am. But if I was to really try and put your sound into words, I know it would be much different than a simple train outside some flat in the slums. You were the sound of shifting foundations, cracking drywall, and crying windows. Oh, the glass was so loud. You were the sound of pain and fear. You placed my heart in my ear drums and mixed it all in a violent crash. You sounded like the earth had crashed. And I felt it.

I also felt you darkness that you so wonderfully brought along for the ride. With it I felt the darkness of my dad carrying me in his arms through the blackness. The halls, the rooms, the entire house was filled with your darkness...and it only helped the sound sink in...it only helped make me hurt. I still, to this day, wonder if it was your motions, your actual movement of everything around me in that darkness, or your sound that shook me most. Either way, you shook me, and then you were gone.

Next it was the candle light and I lying on a bed. My mom was holding my sister at the head of the bed, talking about how her feet were shredded from running through shards of china and broken picture frames in the hall. My sister was crying with a sense of misunderstanding, the type of sobbing that was so easily comforted at the little ages before she could know how frightening you really were. My father was standing, watching the transformers on the horizon, exploding as they overloaded and crashed to the earth. I remember seeing him silhouetted by the city lights as he looked out the double glass doors. I think his words to my mother were, "The transformers are blowing up." In my mind, this created horrid images of giant robotic creatures being blown into smithereens over the glowing city skyline. This frightened me.

My parents tried to comfort me, stop my shivering, but I knew they were just as scared of you as I was.

The house, the one thing that had always protected us from the world outside, now became the weapon of that world. It could have smothered us within its ruins. It could have taken us down the hill it sat upon, dealing death in its own demise. It could have. This fear of the "could have" strikes the right chord into the souls of even the bravest human beings, even my parents.

And so it was that I ended the night lying in the fetal position at the foot of my parent's giant bed, unable to get the vibration of you out of my body. I shuttered as I fought and cried as I slept.