Kinder Eggs
Most days the surface of my mind is placid and still, turqoise, cobalt and indigo blue. A sea mind.
The surface stillness may go on for days or weeks or months. And then sometimes, something happens a fragment of thought or feeling or memory erupts from the depths like a leaping marlin.
Today, I was shopping for my Secret Santa present for a collegaue at work, and trying to figure out the maximum amount of chocolate my £3 budget would stretch to, when someone jostled me and the Kinder Egg I had been holding fell. It dropped like a penny, and in that instant of its fall the fragments of memory resurfaced and I understood why it is I had avoided buying Kinder Eggs for well over a decade.
The autumn of 1989. On the eve of my Dad's brain surgery, my mom was going to the hospital to see him. When he'd spoken to my mother he'd requested something of mine to take with him, so I gave her to take him a small thing. Small enough to be smuggled into theatre in a man's clutched hand. A tiny plastic trinket really. A Kinder Egg toy.
And then he died. He suffered a massive haemorrhage in the brain, and he went into a coma, and he never woke up. And the impact of it hit the most in little ways.
Like the day after the day after he'd died. And there were quiet, somber people in the living room. My aunt dressed in black. And I was not sure that I could control my voice or my face, so I didn't want to speak, but I had to come and say hello anyway. My aunt, wordless, offering me two Kinder Eggs. Me, wordless, taking them, and knowing in that fraction of an instant some of the enormity of what had happened. That my aunt who was always so aganst me eating sweets, who censored my consumption of chocolate should be giving me treats now. Not one Kinder egg. But two.
They are not a treat or a distraction, so much as a different kind of sadness. They turn to cardboard and ash in my mouth.
And later still, days or weeks, or months perhaps, for I have barely any recollections of that first year, I was at a friend's house and he was attempting to cheer me up by showing me his Kinder Egg toy collection. But I don't ever feel like I summon up the expected admiration.
The lined up toys struck me as something immesurably sad. Like rows of broken eggs. Or lines of corpses on an empty field.
The surface stillness may go on for days or weeks or months. And then sometimes, something happens a fragment of thought or feeling or memory erupts from the depths like a leaping marlin.
Today, I was shopping for my Secret Santa present for a collegaue at work, and trying to figure out the maximum amount of chocolate my £3 budget would stretch to, when someone jostled me and the Kinder Egg I had been holding fell. It dropped like a penny, and in that instant of its fall the fragments of memory resurfaced and I understood why it is I had avoided buying Kinder Eggs for well over a decade.
The autumn of 1989. On the eve of my Dad's brain surgery, my mom was going to the hospital to see him. When he'd spoken to my mother he'd requested something of mine to take with him, so I gave her to take him a small thing. Small enough to be smuggled into theatre in a man's clutched hand. A tiny plastic trinket really. A Kinder Egg toy.
And then he died. He suffered a massive haemorrhage in the brain, and he went into a coma, and he never woke up. And the impact of it hit the most in little ways.
Like the day after the day after he'd died. And there were quiet, somber people in the living room. My aunt dressed in black. And I was not sure that I could control my voice or my face, so I didn't want to speak, but I had to come and say hello anyway. My aunt, wordless, offering me two Kinder Eggs. Me, wordless, taking them, and knowing in that fraction of an instant some of the enormity of what had happened. That my aunt who was always so aganst me eating sweets, who censored my consumption of chocolate should be giving me treats now. Not one Kinder egg. But two.
They are not a treat or a distraction, so much as a different kind of sadness. They turn to cardboard and ash in my mouth.
And later still, days or weeks, or months perhaps, for I have barely any recollections of that first year, I was at a friend's house and he was attempting to cheer me up by showing me his Kinder Egg toy collection. But I don't ever feel like I summon up the expected admiration.
The lined up toys struck me as something immesurably sad. Like rows of broken eggs. Or lines of corpses on an empty field.