My Earliest Memory

In my earliest memory, I am a two year old girl. I’m waking up in my bedroom of my first house, a single wide trailer that seems enormous as it is the only world I know. It is early morning and the sun is shining through my bedroom window, reflecting off the hard wood floor.

I can see the dust filtering through the beam of sunlight as I get out of my bed, a twin size that seems to me more like a queen size. I yawn and stretch, reaching up trying to the ceiling as far as I can and wondering if I have ever reached as high.

I hear a rooster crowing faintly in the barn, and I suddenly forget about my height problem immediately connecting the crowing of the rooster to a cartoon I want to watch.

Extreme Irony

On Monday, February 19, 2007, I received a phone call from my mom telling me that one of the boys I went to high school with had died in a motorcycle crash. I hadn’t known the boy as well as I would have liked to, but I did consider him a friend. Moreover, I wanted to be there for my good friends who were close to him, and who needed a shoulder to cry on. It was for these reasons that I rode all the way home from college, almost a two hour drive, just to go to his viewing.

For those of you who have never been to the funeral viewing of a twenty year old boy who had been raised in a small town by parents who literally knew everyone, take my word for it, it is not something you want to experience. When I arrived at the funeral home with my younger brother, just a few minute after they had opened, there was already a long line of people outside the front door. Somehow, in all the tears and confusion, I was able to find my friends standing in the middle of the line. As we all stood there, them silently trying to hold back their tears, I couldn’t help but hear the conversation of the people behind us. They were talking and laughing. I know that people deal with pain in different ways, some with laughter and some with tears, but as I stood there listening to the latest small-town gossip, I couldn’t help but think about how much the line I was standing in reminded me of the lines at Six Flags. You know what I’m talking about, those impossibly long lines that you stand in when you’re waiting for you’re turn on the “death defying” rollercoaster, but this was nothing like Six Flags. There was no exciting rollercoaster waiting for me at the end. There were only tears, and a dampened sweater from where my best friend cried on my shoulder.

As I stood there, noting the extreme irony of the whole situation, the people behind me continued to laugh.

~Kayla Elise

Reasoning

This semester I am enrolled in a Creative Nonfiction class, and one of our assignments requires us to create an internet blog. That is why I am here, putting my personal essays, memoirs, etc. online. Feel free to read and to comment.

Kayla Elise