The fallen tree grew a few apples but not many. Fire ants make nests in the hollow of the roots and soon they will burn, and the tree with them. The days grow so hot and it seems that the garden wilts each afternoon. I so rarely dedicate attention to the weather that summer is a bizarre occurrence to me, though it happens every year and I should be expected to anticipate it. As a boy my obligations were subject to the weather day by day and so I was preternaturally aware of what the wind and swamp air promised. Now I only wish to know if it will rain, so I can decide if I must mow the yard soon or if this labor can be delayed.
An impossible thing happened. I was about to eat and so I was boiling precisely four cups of water for my ramen and I had made two sandwiches with turkey and American artificial cheese and mayonnaise and brown mustard and as the water was heating I sat on the couch to read and wait and I looked on the coffee table. There was a photo album on it. It was shaped like most photo albums are shaped and it was old as I am and it was a particular shade of blue just as the photo album of my childhood had been shaded. I thought it had been destroyed. I thought I had destroyed it. I must have planned to do it a thousand times. Through all the unhinged destruction of my past in my early adulthood, it managed to survive and one thing led to another and a decade later Mormon missionaries came into possession of it and returned it to my mother, who returned it to me. I could not make this up.
There are not many pictures in it. I hated cameras then and now, as you no doubt remember. There are pictures of me in my infancy and childhood that exist elsewhere, but many of the photographs that I found flung at me from the distant past have no known copies. I do not know how to describe the sensation of looking through those photographs. It was as if I was proving to myself that I existed. That was why I intended to destroy them, of course, in my younger and more volatile years. I wanted there to be nothing left of me- what a bitter and cynical man I was! What a bitter and cynical man I am.
For a month this letter has been finished and yet it remains. I ask myself a cruel question every day: “What’s the point?” Not so many mornings ago a storm emerged and I walked out into the yard stripped to the waist and raised my arms above my head, as is my custom. It was a beautiful morning and later that day the sky turned to yellow and tornadoes threatened but they did not find me. I shivered and was as tall as the goddamn sky and I didn’t ask myself any more questions that day. I wish you could see these impossible pictures, taken of me so long ago, when within me there was not even the idea of evil. I would be faded by time and vision while fishing or wearing ill-fitted suits or playing in the snow and that is a part of me I fear that you have never seen and I could not have shown it to you because I myself had forgotten it and now it does not matter anymore, except in the way that history matters to an old man. And today I feel so old, Cordelia. Seven years ago I never thought I would get so old.
An impossible thing happened. I was about to eat and so I was boiling precisely four cups of water for my ramen and I had made two sandwiches with turkey and American artificial cheese and mayonnaise and brown mustard and as the water was heating I sat on the couch to read and wait and I looked on the coffee table. There was a photo album on it. It was shaped like most photo albums are shaped and it was old as I am and it was a particular shade of blue just as the photo album of my childhood had been shaded. I thought it had been destroyed. I thought I had destroyed it. I must have planned to do it a thousand times. Through all the unhinged destruction of my past in my early adulthood, it managed to survive and one thing led to another and a decade later Mormon missionaries came into possession of it and returned it to my mother, who returned it to me. I could not make this up.
There are not many pictures in it. I hated cameras then and now, as you no doubt remember. There are pictures of me in my infancy and childhood that exist elsewhere, but many of the photographs that I found flung at me from the distant past have no known copies. I do not know how to describe the sensation of looking through those photographs. It was as if I was proving to myself that I existed. That was why I intended to destroy them, of course, in my younger and more volatile years. I wanted there to be nothing left of me- what a bitter and cynical man I was! What a bitter and cynical man I am.
For a month this letter has been finished and yet it remains. I ask myself a cruel question every day: “What’s the point?” Not so many mornings ago a storm emerged and I walked out into the yard stripped to the waist and raised my arms above my head, as is my custom. It was a beautiful morning and later that day the sky turned to yellow and tornadoes threatened but they did not find me. I shivered and was as tall as the goddamn sky and I didn’t ask myself any more questions that day. I wish you could see these impossible pictures, taken of me so long ago, when within me there was not even the idea of evil. I would be faded by time and vision while fishing or wearing ill-fitted suits or playing in the snow and that is a part of me I fear that you have never seen and I could not have shown it to you because I myself had forgotten it and now it does not matter anymore, except in the way that history matters to an old man. And today I feel so old, Cordelia. Seven years ago I never thought I would get so old.
