Lasers From the Eyes

Quite often I find myself recalling a very particular moment from my youth. It is how most of the past is remembered, in fragments. There is a feeling to the memory, that of the past. A time gone, a place changed and only the future remains. I often come back to this memory because even while I experienced it, I must have know it would not remain. Or perhaps I remember it because it was the last time I really believed.

It was in the backyard of my best friends house growing up as a kid. I say kid as in younger than ten because most of the memories I have from around the time before I was ten years old more or less converge upon each other as if they're on a sinking ship, an old ship with sails and the sails are on fire and the ship is sinking and the boat is surrounded by all sorts of ends and they all fight and push and climb over each other to get to the masts and the ones that get there are pushing and shoving and climbing. They climb not to live but stave off death a little longer. There is no chance of escape but they fight to be the last to surrender, the last to float lifelessly downward. So my memories all struggle against each other and time and the rocking boat beneath them to just live and not drown. Now what I mean by best friends during this time is not really a best friend because who has that, but more properly the child of the mother that my mom happened to make friends with. Most best friends meet when they're very young and stay so until they realize that whole life they found created around them was created by other people. The friendship lingers due to those familial ties and simply the duration of the friendship. I imagine it's a lot like a marriage, where the two people together are kinda happy for a few years and then they kinda just go through the motions for a few years and when someone finally gets around to looking at their life they're too tired to admit they had fallen asleep, so instead of waking up they simply go back to sleep.

Back to my best friends back yard on an absolutely gorgeous summer day. A donkey from a past birthday keeps clawing his way up the mast and eventually slips beneath the waves. This backyard was the backyard of my friends first house. Such places hold odd feelings for such voyages. My ship is filled with colorful and vibrant images from my friend's second and current house. I have memories with patches of carpet and with furniture that is still there. This old house still stands but not like it was. There is a change that happened that cannot be returned. The place sits as if destroyed, irretrievable in the past yet there is a new place that serves the function of the old place. There is reverence in my mind for a place where I grew, where I became.

This particularly beautiful day found my young friend and I in the backyard playing a game we surely played countless times and for hours on end yet I can only really recall this one time. There were these little figurines of super heroes my friend and I had. They were more like statues, molded from some soft plastic into little five inch men. They had no parts, no extending arms or cape, no gear just a sold piece of colored plastic with arms at the side, or maybe crossed. There was nothing to them. We were running around chasing each other and the bad guys, of course. I do not recall the game we played or what exactly we did, there was a swing set that played a role somewhere but my memory always comes back to the lasers I imagined shot from the eye of my figure. I recall seeing them so vividly. These red jets of lights pouring destruction from the eyes of my super hero. The super hero I had didn't even do that in his fictional portrayals. It wasn't that guy from the x-men. I remember looking up and shooting at the sky and seeing this light just pour forth.

Perhaps I am remembering a time when I remembered that, because this time I recall was special. This time from the past has those lasers from the eyes but something more, no more lasers. I saw the lasers for the last time that day. I saw my imagination for the first time, I discovered the world in my head, i grew up a little bit. I still search for that toy when I go to my Mom's. It would be a relic of my past but also my mind. I would hold him in my hand as I used to; hand clutched around his torso, folded arms near my trigger finger as I would command destructive blasts from his eyes and see them with mine.

I think of those times at one of the Cathedrals of my youth and mourn a time when such joy could come from such inanimate plastic. I am happy I had such an axle-less childhood to make memories with. I think of how many parts are needed for objects to fill me with anything that resembles what was in my mind on those summer afternoons at my best friends first house with the birthday party and the donkey and the glass door I went through but don't remember.