Inflection Point

For a long time I circled the idea of turning this space into an event journal, and every time the thought surfaced I waved it away. The trouble, if you can call it that, is that sobriety keeps the mind too lucid, too orderly, and nothing spills out on its own. Except, of course, on the days you wander out for Kombucha and come home clutching a bottle of cider. Such is life.

I sat down tonight meaning to write about how I feel. Then it struck me that how I feel today won’t matter much tomorrow. What will matter, what I’ll want waiting for me when my grip on my own mind begins to loosen, are the memories worth keeping. So I’ll use this place to set them down while I still can.

This one is about the day everything tilted. The day that sent ripples out across the rest of my life.

We were spending the afternoon at a small hermitage. I was off with my cousins, playing at imaginary railways. Three raised, narrow mud paths threaded between the plantations, and in our minds they carried trains barreling toward a danger they couldn’t see. We were the danger. We ran along the ridges hurling stones at the invisible spots where the trains were meant to be, derailing them, bombing them, laughing. The rituals droned on around us; the adults were lost in their own make-believe, and so were we. Then my mother called for me and my sister, and there was an urgency in her voice that didn’t fit the afternoon. We were bundled into an old Fiat. My father had already gone, I gathered, left earlier on his scooter. I sat wedged in the middle of the front seat. An older cousin drove; my father’s elder brother sat to my left. Behind us, my mother, my sister, and my uncle’s wife, all of them whispering. A few minutes down the road, I heard it. Wailing. My mother, weeping in a way that could not be consoled. My sister, sniffling beside her. I was baffled. I wondered if some quiet quarrel had broken open in the back seat, old grievances rising to the surface. The uncle beside me said something sharp under his breath, something like, “I told you not to say anything yet.” Still, no one told me anything. So I did what I’ve always done: I sat there trying to assemble the truth from fragments, guessing at what could possibly be wrong. I see now that even then I was reluctant to ask the plain, bold question outright. That has never left me. We reached a junction near our hometown. My sister and I climbed out, and only then did I notice a jeep trailing behind us, packed with more relatives. Before we crossed over to it, my mother pulled me into a hug, her eyes brimming, then let me go and turned back to the car. We got into the jeep. My sister’s muffled crying broke loose into open wailing; she flung herself at another aunt, as if to comfort her, or be comforted. I just sat there, unsure, watching all of them. And they watched me the way you watch a small, lost child, too young to understand, even as I sat there perfectly able to. No one said a word. We arrived at a cousin’s house. That’s where my sister finally told me: our father had been in an accident. They’d taken him to a big hospital five hours away. It was serious. But I knew my father. My father was unbreakable. Of course he’d be fine. I thought nothing more of it and spent the rest of the day playing. It was only forty-five days later, when I walked into that hospital to see him, that I understood how wrong I had been.