Creative Writing Class
Just a little something I wrote for my creative writing class. Had to write at least 100 words on our earliest memories. I hate autobiographical creative writing, since it always feels less like creative writing and more like a diary entry, but I thought some of you might find it interesting.
I have earlier memories, but nothing with the power and clarity of when I was seven. Playing with string in preschool and eating Play-Doh in the backyard in the sun are my earliest memories, along with fragments of my brother and our dog and digging in the dirt, of giggles and messy fingers and Mum combing my hair. I am unable to place those memories on a timeline, and they form a sort of colourful mosaic in my mind.
I remember year two, though, and being seven years old with a clarity that I can’t remember what happened yesterday. In particular, one little moment in time that I can’t slide away from, because it seems a profound realisation to have made, even to my nineteen-year-old mind.
I recall my parents’ decision to divorce in flashes and fragments - I remember watching Power Rangers at Nana’s house and Mum pulling us onto her lap and saying Daddy and I don’t love each other anymore. I remember sitting on the kitchen stool and looking up at the painted ceiling and wondering aloud when they would get back together again. Too many films with outlandish endings, I suppose, in which conflicts are always resolved and everyone lives happily ever after. I wonder now just how much that must have broken her heart to hear. I remember picking things up from my room to take to our new place. I remember colours - the yellow of my room with the sun coming in, the kitchen being dark - mustard coloured bench tops and patterned brown linoleum; echoes of the seventies.
But those aren’t the memories I can’t get away from, when I take the time to think. They are the maelstrom, movement and shadow and sunlight. Prisms and mirrors in which fleeting images can be seen for but a moment. They are colour and motion, but my most powerful memory is utterly still.
I don’t remember much but what it felt like to be me. My fingers damp and held uncurled; child smooth. A corner of the backyard that my eyes rested on: brown pool fence and green grass, like I was focussed so intently that the rest of the world ceased to exist. The day was dim - or at least the memory is dim, I’m not sure which. Wind in my hair.
And seeing the backyard, myself and the entire world as if I’d never seen it before. Realising that I’d never look at it the same way again, because things were never going to be the same again. I wasn’t going to live here anymore; I wouldn’t be walking out the back door in the afternoon sun every day with cossies and towel and smile, because things were changing.
I won’t attach any more understanding than that; there probably was none. I think, though, that it was that precise moment that I accepted my parents were getting divorced, and there would be no getting back together. I’d like to say it was a hard lesson; I’d like to say it was a traumatic moment, but I’d be lying. I accepted things as a child does, not attempting to understand but simply feeling. Taking that moment of awareness for granted and heading back inside to poke my younger brother.
I have earlier memories, but nothing with the power and clarity of when I was seven. Playing with string in preschool and eating Play-Doh in the backyard in the sun are my earliest memories, along with fragments of my brother and our dog and digging in the dirt, of giggles and messy fingers and Mum combing my hair. I am unable to place those memories on a timeline, and they form a sort of colourful mosaic in my mind.
I remember year two, though, and being seven years old with a clarity that I can’t remember what happened yesterday. In particular, one little moment in time that I can’t slide away from, because it seems a profound realisation to have made, even to my nineteen-year-old mind.
I recall my parents’ decision to divorce in flashes and fragments - I remember watching Power Rangers at Nana’s house and Mum pulling us onto her lap and saying Daddy and I don’t love each other anymore. I remember sitting on the kitchen stool and looking up at the painted ceiling and wondering aloud when they would get back together again. Too many films with outlandish endings, I suppose, in which conflicts are always resolved and everyone lives happily ever after. I wonder now just how much that must have broken her heart to hear. I remember picking things up from my room to take to our new place. I remember colours - the yellow of my room with the sun coming in, the kitchen being dark - mustard coloured bench tops and patterned brown linoleum; echoes of the seventies.
But those aren’t the memories I can’t get away from, when I take the time to think. They are the maelstrom, movement and shadow and sunlight. Prisms and mirrors in which fleeting images can be seen for but a moment. They are colour and motion, but my most powerful memory is utterly still.
I don’t remember much but what it felt like to be me. My fingers damp and held uncurled; child smooth. A corner of the backyard that my eyes rested on: brown pool fence and green grass, like I was focussed so intently that the rest of the world ceased to exist. The day was dim - or at least the memory is dim, I’m not sure which. Wind in my hair.
And seeing the backyard, myself and the entire world as if I’d never seen it before. Realising that I’d never look at it the same way again, because things were never going to be the same again. I wasn’t going to live here anymore; I wouldn’t be walking out the back door in the afternoon sun every day with cossies and towel and smile, because things were changing.
I won’t attach any more understanding than that; there probably was none. I think, though, that it was that precise moment that I accepted my parents were getting divorced, and there would be no getting back together. I’d like to say it was a hard lesson; I’d like to say it was a traumatic moment, but I’d be lying. I accepted things as a child does, not attempting to understand but simply feeling. Taking that moment of awareness for granted and heading back inside to poke my younger brother.