A Midnight Flashback
On my parents’ refrigerator, there’s a photo of me leaning into the frame of my great grandmother holding my hours-old little brother. I was happy to have beaten the flash of the camera and to involve myself with the moment, according to my proud, seven-year-old smile. Yes, in that kitchen there magnetizes a memory that will never escape my mind, even if one day it’s removed from one of the seemingly inexhaustible arrangments of fridge photographs. I walk up to it.
There’s something spiritually unspoken about that photo, as if my late great-grandmother is trying to reach me through the lamination, just to impart one last piece of wisdom. It’s like a barometer could measure the magnitude of its sentience. Their eyes follow me at whichever angle I stare back.
Yet, no matter how long I gaze, I do not become hypnotized, nor transported back in time, to my disbelief, by what I feel has the compelling potential of a mild psychedelic. It’s been 15 years since my brother’s September morning, 2005 birth, but the simultaneous push and pull from that magnetized polaroid negotiates an apathetic distance from me that a decade and a half cannot fully quantify.
As I stare at my happily-leaning self, I too lean in, until I could analyze the young facial formation of what is now my right dimple. Yet, for how discernably drawn I am to myself, there’s a strange gravity that discriminates against my present being’s physical closeness to the refrigerator door. We are strangers to each other; his smile mocks my languid lips. It becomes clear upon this kitchen connection that I am everything and nothing like that child. I am both within and without that hospital room. And as my eyes increase their paradoxical plastering to this fridge fixture, I start to realize that my ways of youth have sailed into an interstitial stratosphere that I cannot, unlike with the photograph, simply lean for. If my reminiscence is an entrancingly hopeless invocation of a long-lost muse, then true resonance with my former self is a slippery rendering of life as I now know it.
For me, this nostalgia is a silent film. I could sense myself, yes, but what that sentient thumbnail holds in its reels I don’t know. The images of me laughing, playing, and becoming a big brother in those hospital halls haunt, invisibly, the contactless text of a toddler’s triumphant moments, lost in the translation of time.
Now, to stand on these coffee-table tiles is to reach for that translation, that resonation, to punch in regularly again, against time, and against all resignation to life’s simple ecstacies. To be young again. But not physically — just to feel it. To be born again, like my brother was that day. To be in that hospital room, with no past self to stare back at.
As I snap away from the childhood memento, the floor begins to tremble. The tiles divorce from the grout that glues them together. My mind rolls and sways in timeless vertigo. The photo falls from its magnet, just within the frame of my periphery. Leaning back, I dive for it.
