A Total Eclipse

05/12/2014
Caumsett

Hidey ho again neighbors... 
I might have something interesting to say today seeing as how it is shaping up to be a very beautiful day (thank you)...

Last week I was walking along the shoreline of the Long Island Sound trying not to think much at all as thinking usually only complicates and frustrates me when I allow myself to engage in it for very long.  I was trying to simply allow myself to be exactly what and where I was, a late thirties 'man'  walking by himself in the sun on a beach.  All I wanted out of the moment was the chance to simply be in the moment.  Just a brief respite from living in the past or engaged in fictitious conversations in the future or any of the myriad of non-realities my wonderful mind is capable of dragging me through simply to fill precious dead space.  In the midst of this I was overcome by a very vivid memory.  It is a memory that I have carried with me in all its technicolor glory for most of my life.

I remembered being a young lad of perhaps around seven or eight years old. A far cry from the world weary and wizened old gentleman you see before you now.  At the age of seven or eight I lived in my Grandma's house (my father's mother was always called Grandma and my mother's parents were Grandmother and Grandfather to differentiate) with my parents, my then two younger siblings, my aunt, and of course Grandma.  Quite a packed house. This particular memory took place on a rare afternoon when I found myself in the house alone.  I don't remember at all the circumstances which would have allowed for this but that's memory for you, all picky and choosy about details! Anyway, we had in the house at that time cable TV and therefore MTV still in its infancy when 'music television' still meant that there was music.  I, at my young impressionable age was generally not allowed to watch the MTV as my mother was unsure about all the rock and roll music and possible demonic imagery involved in bringing it to life, so naturally whenever I found myself alone or at least devoid of parental supervision MTV was the first thing I put on hoping to see or hear something I wasn't supposed to.

On this particular afternoon I saw the video for the song "Turn Around (Bright Eyes)" by Bonnie Tyler.  Right from the opening bars of the song and a camera shot of Ms. Tyler leaning against a window staring longingly out at nothing my seven or eight year old self was overcome by the 'idea' of emotion that I was nowhere near understanding (and probably still am nowhere near understanding all these years later).  I was suddenly awash in a great sense of sadness.  Sadness in particular brought upon by loss.  In particular the loss of love. Now, having had only about seven or eight years on this fine planet among the rest of you humans I had not (at least to my knowledge or awareness) experienced any great loss.  I certainly (again at least to my knowledge or awareness) experienced any great loss of love.  As far as I knew in my own life the only love I knew was that of my family, certainly not the romantic boy-girl love depicted as so painful and deep in the song.

The crazy thing to me (and this is also part of the memory) is that at seven or eight years old I knew to myself that the sense of emotion I was getting from this song was not an emotion that I had any right to feel (here's a concept that will definitely come up more at some point!  therapy bell please...) let alone understand.  But my mind latched onto this 'idea' of profound emotion and I could not stop thinking about it.  Thinking about what it must be like to be deeply in love and to have that love dissappear or go away or turn on me like it seemed to in the song.

Even seeing the video for this song now with all of my thirty some-odd years of much experience behind me most of the imagery used doesn't make any sense to me as far as the context of the lyrics (acrobats in silly suits doing backflips and wearing masks, lots of gossamer fabric blowing through open doorways, etc. (definitely don't get the acrobats!)), however that one image of Bonnie staring out that window as if looking for the love that was lost stood out in my young mind as the image that represented the feeling of the song as a whole.

So for weeks I obsessed over the 'idea' of this great and deep emotion of which I had no real understanding at all and despite the fact that I understood that it was painful and really not a good thing to have to experience I wanted to feel it.  I wanted to be that person staring out that window.  I craved to know what that really felt like.  To have the memories in my own mind of the events that led up to that moment.  (yeah, I guess I was crazy from a pretty young age!)

Well friends and neighbors, the memory doesn't end there...

Sometime later (I have no idea how long, could've been a week could've been six months) I once again found myself alone in Grandma's house on an afternoon.   Now I honestly don't remember if it was actually raining out or if I only imagined it to be raining because that would've gone with the mood so much better, but I had on MTV and here came "Turn Around"  through the glorious one speaker floor set tv.  Right at the opening of the song I got up and went to the front door of my Grandma's house, leaned against the doorframe and stared out the window in the best recreation of Ms. Tyler's pose that I could muster (certainly not my most masculine of moments).  (you see why now I might have imagined it was raining even if it wasn't) And for five and a half glorious minutes I had lived and loved and lost in a way that no other seven or eight year old boy ever had!  If I could have mustered up tears on cue the waterworks would have been flowing that was how lost in this manufactured sadness I became for those five and a half minutes.  I didn't want that feeling (or the song that was feeding it) to end and when it finally did I believe I did experience a little piece of loss in seeing it go.  

This, while it may not be the actual beginning is my earliest memory of something that would recur again and again in my life in various ways.  A secret emotional life if you will, for this was something I kept completely to myself and never shared with another human being for a very long time.  But this concept of manufacturing emotions that I did not think I had any right to yet used to escape would later become a major theme in my life which tied in very closely to my struggles with addiction as these emotions and concepts which I used to seemingly escape my own life were almost always those that leaned towards the darker, more painful side of things and despite how dark and painful my actual life became I still held on (hold on) to the idea that I have no right to feel some of the things that I feel. (therapy bell again please...)

For now I will leave that there to marinate as it will...