vivid memories

On Friday night Toni was beat-- she went to bed at about 9:50 and was asleep by about 9:51. I wasn't quite tired so I stayed up until about 11:30 pm. When I finally DID go to bed, I had a lot of trouble falling asleep.

I was being flooded with vivid memories from my childhood and adolescence. I started remembering a lot of my old childhood friends which have long since passed out of my life and wondering what's become of their lives.

But with one of those friends the memories were more vivid than the others. And it wasn't just one memory at a time-- it was all of my memories of all the times spent with that friend flooding me all at once-- every single time he'd been invited over to hang out and go sledding and watch WWF wrestling, every time I'd been invited to his family's camp in the Adirondacks, having a bit of a crush on his older college age sister, getting stuck in the mud of the farm behind my parents house. It was like a brick wall of emotion running into me. I had all of these memories-- but the one that struck in my mind the most was the phone call when I was a freshman in college-- over 600 miles away finding out he'd gotten into a fight with his parents the night before-- been kicked out and the next morning he'd gone home, stood in the front yard of the place he'd known as his home, and shot himself.

I wasn't awake, I wasn't asleep-- I was caught somewhere in between and just continued being flooded. And after those images of Jesse had passed, I started getting images of other childhood friends-- grade school era. I remembered the friends I used to ski with at Titus Mountain (I had this habit of taking every slope flat out, not turning, tucked in and zooming down like a bomb).

Eventually, I did drift to sleep this way. But it was fitful and restless and I felt like every time I woke up those memories were waiting for me.