matter-of-fact ghosts

When the weather gets crisp and cold like this a stillness spreads across the world and the world gets the quality of early morning pond before sunrise. When the weather gets like this if you drag yourself out of bed early, bundle up, and bring a cheap giveaway thermos of weak Wawa coffee you can sit on a rock or on the damp ground itself to watch the lake, to watch the lake as small washes of implied light demarcate the day. To watch memories of pain surface like sunnies or bass to briefly break the stillness of the morning water.

(Left to his own devices the balding bureaucrat feels another maybe side effect of no-longer drinking: Memories that haven't seen the light of day in ages break years of bad practice, of numbing anaesthetic).

What do you do with the pain you remember, tangled with the pain you caused others? How do you free yourself from it to live in the present? I’ve been tempted to find other ways to numb this dull pain because I don’t know how to look these memories in the face. It’s like being visited by matter-of-fact ghosts, droll ghosts that by this point bore and sadden as much as terrify.

When we were kids we used to go fishing. We mostly practiced catch and release but sometimes in between we would torture the fish. It wasn’t how I thought of it then, it felt more like playing. I remember we would whirl them on the end of the line like a kind of lasso. Sometimes the line would wrap around a branch, resulting in the improbable miracle of fish in a tree. All you needed to catch them was bread rolled in a ball on a hook.

Being exposed to violence and how you pass it onto other beings on some instinctive level. As a child you are simply a conduit of violence; it can pass through you (with you as its instrument) and you don’t even know. As an adult you might not know but you aren’t justified in that, because you’re in a position where you could and should know.

Throwing bread into the water, this time of course without a hook and an intent to twirl. Like apologizing to the fish, or their descendants. If they’re ginger to approach the surface I can’t blame them.