mermaid fins & star tails

III of IV | December 11, 2003

I KNOW something you don’t know. That is how she greets me. Tiffany Whitmore. Everyday, she greets me with her cute girl smile and her cute girl ponytails and her cute girl shoes that tap against the pavement.

She is always afloat with happiness and always has something to say. She always wants to be a step ahead of me. Her with her maturity. Her mother says that she is ten years old going on twenty-five. Whatever that means. Tiffany pretends not to like me sometimes because I am the type of kid that finds farts amusing. Although, she always offers me bubble gum or lollipops or sugarcoated pretzels, along with a bad joke or a lame piece of gossip or some new piece of intelligence that she picked up from hearing her parents talk over dinner.

Yesterday she tried to explain puberty to me. She was way off. Sometimes I play along, allowing her to spout off things that really prove how smart she isn’t, all the while I am smiling and nodding and acting as if I have been enlightened, until she turns and skips away. Her and her girlie-girl shoes. Her salutation is the same as her introduction. I know something you don’t know. Lame.

So here I am. Sleepless. My bargain-priced clock and me, counting down the hours until sunrise. The voices and the echoes of the night are fading into a dull murmur; a virtual silence. With just over a week left until I go home, I find myself doing nothing but focusing on what got me here.

The focus of my studies revolved around the eight most abundant elements of the Earth’s crust. Our super aunt is cooking seven perfect meals; this was my very own mnemonic device. I had written and recited this device over and over again in order to remember oxygen, silicon, aluminum, iron, calcium, sodium, potassium, and magnesium. This was at the focus of my studies, me the theater major, me the artist and writer, and here I was hell-bent on memorizing elements and categorizing rocks.

It got to a point where I was fantasizing about the rock cycle. Extremely hot metamorphic rock melting into magma, erupting from volcanoes. Cooling off to become solid igneous rock, which weathers, creating sediments. Sediments go through lithification, creating sedimentary rock, which then weathers and so on and so forth. I am sure you see the cycle, more importantly, the attraction.

This was my collegiate life in general education requirements. This is where I was stuck. Approximately ten minutes north of Boston, Massachusetts, in the historic town of Salem. Surrounded by witches and legends and folklore and myths, surrounded by elements and rocks and cycles. This was my lack of enthusiasm.

There was nothing complex planned in the architecture of my childhood. There was nothing in my upbringing to suggest that I was going to live my life differently. It was just me, the perfectionist, who began to see the world as nothing more than opportunity. Me; who was contemplating completing my foreign language requirements via night courses. Me; who witnessed the mundane routine that had become the life of the world around me. Me; who wanted something more.

I lay awake. The thoughts that race through one’s mind as he struggles to sleep are thoughts that cannot be paralleled by any other experience. I compare this semi-insomniac feeling to the possibility of sleeping on my back with a penny pinched between my lips. There is no rest when you are constantly aware that if your lips loosen then you will choke. The challenge is to trust that your body will stay conscious of the inherent danger, thus keeping grip on the penny while enabling you to sleep.

My clock slips past midnight. There are voices echoing through surfaces in every direction. The floor is offering the sound of some girl singing or talking or laughing. In her echoes, she reminds me of Tiffany Whitmore.

And Tiffany reminds me of bubbles, which remind me of childhood.

In mine and Tiffany’s world, there was no scientific fact, no reason given to the way things were, or rather the way in which we understood them to be. What we knew for sure was that we could either validate our world by defining it with fact, or we could invest in it with the simple complexity of our imagination.

I remember snacking on nasal mucus. In my mind this was more beneficial than spinach, or any other green vegetable that I was force-fed. Anybody who remembers their childhood differently is lying; either to mislead themselves or someone else. Children eat boogers, that is a fact; a fact that Tiffany Whitmore chose to see as a fault.

Tiffany’s childhood obsessions revolved around dollhouses and dresses and pretty things that shimmered. My childhood obsessions revolved around destructive action figures and dirt and things that would float and things that would sink.

With inches of snow on the ground, bundled in our snow suits, Tiffany and I get along, as we build snowmen and snow forts. We bring our imagination to life without hesitation. The reality of our childhood is the ability to bend reality, to believe in pop-up-book worlds and fantasy palaces and fairy tale endings.

This is Grand. Our imaginary secular kingdom. We are young adventurous pioneers at the center of that which we imagine. Beyond the snow-front of our yard there are gigantic towers of all shapes that stretch up through the clouds; huge white puffy clouds.

Here in Grand, Tiffany tells me, the flowers bloom all year round and it only snows here once every year, that being the week of Christmas. The snow never falls like a blizzard, but only in flurries, and every time a snowflake touches down against the ground it chimes a melodic sound. Any vehicle that moves through Grand does not bump, clang, grind, or screech, instead they hum, glide, hover, and jingle.

At the center of Grand there lies Neverwood Greens. Tiffany and I have mapped it all out. We know where the mayor of Grand lives and how to mimic his voice. We know where the lake is and how many mermaids live there. We know how fun the kingdom of Grand is and how lucky we are to be a part of it.

Until the sun sets and our mothers call our names.

Tomorrow we will return to throwing snowballs and name-calling, and Tiffany will retreat into her maturity by reciting some dumb song her parents taught her. Something about sticks and stones not breaking bones.

My clock now ventures into earlier hours of the morning. One wall offers the sound of a couple, fighting, arguing, and aggravating each other. The ceiling offers the loud obnoxious behavior of someone moving furniture or taming a four hundred pound lion or dominating themselves with a bolder, a slingshot, and a trampoline. The windows offer the sound of late night traffic being stirred.

My mind is now a panoramic montage of all things nostalgic. I do not know how long ago I stopped using my childhood imagination, but I do recognize that I must have moved away from Grand at least fifteen years ago.

It has only been approximately four months since I moved away from home and I miss it more now than I have ever missed Tiffany, or Grand, or maybe the truth is I miss them all the same.

Well into my twenties, I think I am just now beginning to realize what drives an adolescent male; his psychology, his thirst for excitement, his loyalty to his friends, and his relationship with authoritative figures. Prior to birth we have no choice. We cannot choose our looks, our language, our family, or our religion. The earliest choice we are given is the choice to live with what we are dealt and to make adjustments as we go. We learn this in our adolescent years, as a teenager moving into our twenties.

I begin to wonder if maybe the reason that I am not sleeping is because I did not have turkey this year. Perhaps a lack of tryptophan has lead to insomnia.

My eyes are plastered to my ceiling. I am once again counting down the eves before Christmas. There is just over a week left before I return home. Then there is my doorway offering the sound of elevators and people conversing.

What the hustle outside of my apartment tells me is that I am not alone. I am not wide-awake in a world of sleepers. I am not the only person tip-toeing through fields of shattered memories trying to re-configure them into a recognizable shape.

I am not the only person who grew up in a world that stripped down almost every myth that I sank my heart into. I am not the only person who recognizes the parallel between my childhood stories and the larger socially acclaimed, religious, iconic stories that exist to make life bearable. Perhaps what separates me from the religious family in which I was raised, is that what they see as truth, I see as a metaphor.

I am hearing elevator doors and city traffic and people arguing and loud music and Tiffany’s shoes?

Tiffany and I have our own tree house in Grand that overlooks the lake. We spent an entire night once counting mermaid fins and star tails. A star tail is the streak of light left behind a star that is falling out of heaven. Tiffany tells me that when a star falls from heaven it is only because the ocean goddess needs it to spread more light around the ocean floor. I believe her.

It is one of those nights when you can smell the snow before it starts to fall. Bundled in our snow suits, on the eve before Christmas Eve, Tiffany and I sit elbow to elbow in our tree house window and for the first time in a long time she has nothing to say, and neither do I.

And for the first time in a long time, we are both content in our silence.

Until, what Tiffany refers to as the Earth’s own shadow, tells us that it is night and our mothers call our names.

Tiffany’s girlie-girl shoes tap against the planked wood of the tree house floor. As she goes to leave she reaches into her girlie-girl backpack and pulls out a small, wrapped box. She places it on our tiny tree house table, she smiles, and she vanishes down our tree house ladder.

Inside the small, wrapped box I find a starfish with a note tied to it. “Your very own piece of light, from the heavens and the ocean goddess and me. Merry Christmas.”

The things that I knew as a child and never talked about, were the things that Tiffany talked about without knowing, yet I may be convinced that Tiffany did in fact know something that I did not know. The funny thing is, I still do not know what it was, because, in the reality of my childhood, there was no Tiffany Whitmore, in the same way that there was no Santa Claus, no Tooth Fairy, and no Easter Bunny, there was just the idea. The willful suspension of disbelief. The story and the storyteller.

Fiction is as real as the faith we invest in it, and the same is true for reality. Reality can be as exaggerated and as fictional as we want it to be. In the end, it is not important how much truth goes into a story, as much as it is important how much truth comes out.

#