Divide

Every night at midnight, the purple clouds came out to dance with the blushing sky. It was a visual lullaby that transfixed my violet eyes from my earliest days. The ladies having coffee with my mother in the living room would remark, "What a strange child it is, to be in the crib wide awake so late, night after night." Their words would not have turned my head even if I had heard them. To drink the sight of the midnight clouds was prerequisite to my dream-drowned slumber. Snatches of those early dreams still live in the back of my skull and sometimes brush against my memory. The colors, the textures, the vague shapes that occupy the dreams of infancy float subtly, casting dim shadows across my coherent, waking thoughts.

I only know what the women said because my mother happened to mention it one day during a drive through the country. From my crib the only evidence that other people lived was the warm aroma of the coffee and the occasional pink vibrations of laughter. I'm told it took me longer than most children to become aware of others. For four years and eight months I existed alone in bliss giving no thought to how my needs were met that how man-made objects around me were indeed made by man. Most children don't remember the exact moment they ceased to be alone, becoming fully cognizant of mothers, fathers, siblings and friends. Nearly every adult has forgotten what the world looked like to them before. Having arrived at that moment so late, my memory of the event is unusually vivid.

The floor of my playroom was a thick shag carpet, the texture of which irritated my legs, but not my feet. I sat on the floor atop a pale blue Minky blanket with a texture that bothered my face, but not my legs. Wooden alphabet blocks surrounded me, and even without knowing what letters were I instinctively knew to arrange them in groups. My sweet child's brain had given its own names and sounds to the symbols on the blocks, and I chirped them aloud as I wrote a language all my own. Very suddenly, I heard my mother's voice for the first time, "What are you singing about, little one?" And my eyes saw my mother, large and soft and buried in fabric, towering above me in a chair with her knitting in her lap. That was the moment I joined the world, adding new ideas like surprise, embarrassment, and awe to my emotional repertoire. (Sometimes people ask me if it's like being born a second time, but even I don't remember being born the first.)

When I see the purple clouds even now, that echo of solitude rings in my chest and I can shut out the world. In the drab daylight there is bustle and expectation and need, layers of life shuffling me from one day to the next. If I want to glean meaning, grow my understanding of people and things and space around me, I have to search for it amid the noise. When the midnight clouds roll by, they bring their truth to me. They bring peace, and somehow, clarity.

In the morning, the clouds are gone, and survival begins. I put the dreams away in the toy chest and place my feet on the hard wood floor. Breakfast is cooked and eaten. There's a dusty commute to a clean glass door that takes a silver key and a sign that flips from "Closed" to "Open". There's a counter, behind which is an apron, behind which is practiced smile, behind which there is me. Bring on the day.