The Forever-Man

The following is a short narrative concerning my childhood as a thief.

Armed with a small flashlight (my phone replaced this soon after), my limited and fleeting knowledge of where the creaky floorboards are, and a midnight appetite I glacially gravitated from my bedroom towards the stairs. Actually, it was never that I was really hungry; just a combination of boredom and the necessity to confirm lie to myself about the dominant ownership I had over my own house. Are these internal contradictions what drive children to so easily throw logic to the wind? Whatever.

I used to kid myself that these astounding Spiderman skills were the driving factor that allowed me to go uncaught by my parents but it was probably just that they didn’t feel like getting out of bed to reprimand me. Anyway I had bigger fish to fry, such as figuring out a way to eat wheat thins in bed while avoiding sleeping in a blanket of crumbs afterword.

It's kind of like how you see a plane fly over head, and you imagine all the people inside can see you, there on the ground walking your dog late at night. And you imagine all those people wonder about your story the way you wonder about theirs. But then the plane flies out of sight and you think about something else for a little while.

It was 200 years ago. No one here now was there then and a lot of people forget that time existed at all. But you can see the remnants of their convictions and intentions and normalities if you're really into that sort of thing. History can be tricky because there's no Forever-Man who we can go to and ask "1947...? Did that really happen or is Grandpa fucking with us?". And he'll look down angrily and reply "Of course it happened I was there." We're forced to keep shotty records of our day to day and bury shoeboxes in the earth. Even I know you can't house an entire memory in a shoebox.