Home Sweet Home

The first home that I remember had a well. Its opening was normally covered with a wooden board, which would be removed when we needed to draw water. The yard was all dirt, the roof all black tiles. There was no front gate, and an outbuilding that might have been a barn or a storehouse separated the yard from the alley. Even when the dry, sunny days went on, the rocks in the well were covered in green moss. I remember the yellow dandelions. The flowers bright as stars, taking root between the stone step up to the house and the dirt of the yard and in the corners between walls. One day, after the rain, a tree frog leapt up to the seat ledge around the house. A bright green creature that looked smaller and cleaner than my two-year-old hand. I reached out, and the tree frog hoppity-hopped out of sight. I cried. Why? No one knows. Even I have forgotten the reason, and therefore no one will ever know. I find myself thinking back to those memories. Events that took place but are remembered by no one. The countless moments that disappear with the only beings who remember them. At times I think such moments are meaningless. But the knowledge that they are the very building blocks of a person's life reminds me that those moments couldn't have no meaning at all. A drop of rain in a storm. A flake of snow in a blizzard. A grain of sand on a beach. Do they make any difference at all, I ask myself. And yet I remember the frog. I remember my sobs, if not the reason. Some memories are stubborn, rooting themselves in our minds while countless others are swept away. Memories I don't know why still remain. The ones I don't choose to keep, but rather seem to have chosen me, to remain with me forever. The tree frog chose me.

It was not long after that memory that we left that house. The new owners demolished the roofs and the walls and put up new ones made of brick. They filled the well, covered the yard with grassy lawns, and erected a gate. Nothing remains of the old house. Several years ago, I happened to pass by with Mom. I pointed at the brick house, which had aged in the decades since, and mentioned the tiled roofs and the well, and Mom replied in shock that there had indeed been an L-shaped house there, with a well in the middle, but that didn't make sense because I couldn't possibly remember. I thought it was unlikely too, but that was the way of memories. I still have many unlikely memories, and because I see time differently than before, I believe that unlikely things are more likely than they might seem. Can we remember the future? Couldn't we have a different eye on another plane, not like the physical eyes we have, but one that sees events yet to come and remembers them? I stopped assuming that life always flows in one direction, like a book that goes from left to right, from the present to the future. Time is a human language. A measuring tool. A promise. An invention we devised and named. Therefore, it should rightly be open to reinterpretation, like so:

Time does not flow; it radiates.

The past is not what has come; the present is not what is here; the future is not what is yet to come. Time is like an explosion, radiating infinitely in every direction yet existing simultaneously and discretely. The past does not disappear. It is simply remembered—or not. The future is already here. It is simply too far to see. At times I think I confuse the two. Events I remember as the past suddenly occur in the present, and events I predict for the future are met with the retort, That's already happened before. What would happen, I wonder, if all humanity were to forget...