An Egg!

Daresn't. I woke to the word. I heard it, just that single word, trailing a waning echo for a long time, like a fading bell. I have only ever heard two people use that word, my mother and my grandmother, both dead for decades, both intoning it with index finger raised. I'd been asleep for nearly twelve hours, hiding. That's what I do now during times I can't go on, those times when grief and sadness come visiting unannounced, when—no matter the love and laughter of the present—the past, unfinished, requires its tribute. I used to drink myself into oblivion whenever those times came round, until I came to prefer oblivion to living and so drank all the time. These days, when it gets too bad, I just sleep.

A contraction for "dares not," used with no concern for person or number. Always an imperative or admonition, the raised index finger marking a boundary. I daresn't; you daresn't; he, she, or it daresn't; we daresn't; youse daresn't; they daresn't. You daresn't think that, say that, do that.

I can't pinpoint where this sadness comes from. I suspect it's a piling up of things, of many different sadnesses. Mostly it is the sorrow of losing two brothers to a wasting and fatal illness that filled our home with sadness and sighing and a grim resolve, a sorrow I seem never to have been able to shake. It is the sadness of watching my parents' once joyful marriage worn to their dutiful and bickering years-long deathwatch over my brothers, and their utter exhaustion afterward. It is the trauma of a sexual assault in boyhood that from time to time returns as a panicked confusion or sudden aphasia.

I thought that all I had to do was remain sober, and for thirty years that sufficed, more or less. I didn't drink, didn't do drugs, quit smoking, learned to take care of myself. But some days I still find myself overwhelmed, unable to get out of my bed. It could be argued that that's an improvement on getting hammered or wasted, or that I am simply a person who needs a lot of sleep, who rises much later than my wife, up with the sun each morning. But I recognize it as the same old oblivion-seeking, the same need for escape. I'm just so good at it now that I don't need chemical assistance.

I understood the admonition: I daresn't despair. Because that's the step I was about to take, led there following self-pity's downward path; right there, where the emptiness begins, I lay curled like a fetus. Another long night of no dreams, another long night of no dreams I could remember, until that voice, and that one word: daresn't.

I know who it was who spoke to me. I know to whom I am grateful.

________

But why are nearly all my memories of my mother from before the age of six or seven? Are those even memories in the same way other episodes from my childhood can be summoned, plotted on a timeline, and understood, more or less, in relation to other events? My first playground fight, when a kid from the Washington School dumped all my schoolwork out of my bag and tore it in pieces—my bloody nose, my broken hand; first kiss, in Mary Ellen Moffett's backyard, sitting on the bulkhead to the rootcellar, smell of fallen apples and the hum of bees; friendships, betrayals, the terrible remorse in the dark confessional, the proud report cards, making the teams, winning and losing, striking a pose and finding a persona that no one would laugh at, the first few blonde and silky whiskers: all that masculine romance of growing up, all that imagination I call memory encoded somehow as sticky stuff in the seams of my convoluted brain.

I was uptown with my mother. I remember a trolley car, which makes this a very early memory because I was born...