How can I transcend the rift between Then and Now?

Can I describe to you the weight of the snow beneath my boot, or the shape of the fog that surrounded the valley below?

It’s all shapes in colors in my head, now. I will keep it that way for a long, long time. I can think of these shapes and colors whenever I want, every morning and night, so long as the red-sticky stuff thumps through the dead weight on the top of my body for the remaining moments of my life.

I went to a mountain in the Westlands. I did so because there was nothing else I was conditioned to do at that very moment in time.

Words appeared in my head.

Music is there now. I can hear strumming and coughing in the distance . . . A woman is talking. She is asking questions. The music plays on.

No one answers her questions.

I don’t have any questions. I have only this:

Dear Cousin,

We drove down the mountain, zig-zagging like slick-footed bandits. Our grandmother — she calls herself a dinosaur with a doctorate in Being Alive — told me of memory. She said that she wakes up and thanks the big, big man Way Up There for another chance to thank him. She turns her head to pictures of her long-gone son, says little words to him. Is he listening? I don’t know. I hope, for her sake, that he is. She thinks he was a German soldier with unfinished business, decided to come back and be her son for a few decades. And then she buried him.

Parents burying their children.

She sits down in bed, maybe returns to the indenture where she lay moments before, hours before, when she rested her ancient mind on the feathers of geese and padded softly through eight decades worth of shapes and colors, moments and scents, people and faces. Maybe she visits her long-gone son, our long-gone older brother. He died on D-Day some time ago.

That’s why she thinks he was a German soldier.

She’s in that place now, thinking of everything and all things. She said she plucks a strand from the well of her mind just once every morning, places the thin band of sensation into her brain, and lives out another moment in some time other than the present.

I softened when she said this, loosened my neck and muscles and gaze. I felt a whirl of snowfall in my chest, thought of moonlight and early morning chirping.

I watched the valley below, whipping by like tear-stormy dream-places. I nodded and thought and thought. There is nothing else I do. It is the eerie condition of my fathomless melancholy. I study the anatomy of dreams and long-gone people.

She does as well, she tells me.

“When you were eleven months old, you had your very first Christmas day,” I can envision her telling me now, dangling in the shapes in colors way up there (but not, dear cousin, Way Up There).

“You turned your little head and looked at me that day,” she says, “in a manner that an infant does not look at an adult. It was bottomless. It soared through me. I said in my mind, ‘He is someone who has been here once before.’”

I drive and drive.

“Maybe he is back, my husband, I don’t know. You’re an old, old soul.”

“I feel old. I feel tired, too.”

She says something about eternity, and of memory, and of everything that has ever happened.

She quotes a man that she believes I am — a man that used to exist, once — one I want very much to meet, somewhere, maybe, if I’m not already him.

In which case I have already met this man. This man — maybe me — said this, as she tells me now in my head, tangled in snowy mountaintops and cups of hot chocolate, tangled in little warm circles engendered with the only happy feelings I claim as my own:

“‘There is no way that history is gone forever, left to the memories of finite human beings, the blood rushing inside of their temporary heads the only buoyant points of existence. Memory is eternal, it is sleeping in space. A huge, huge film reel that plays on endlessly. The Battle of Troy is not lost to the memories of the men who lived it and later died. It plays on, and on . . .’”

I tell her of the anatomy of melancholy. It is something that my mind whirls on about, I say.

“It never shuts off, always spinning around in this manner: black and black and black.”

She, our grandmother, her voice shaking, tells me of the story of a thirty-seven-year-old man who shot himself in the stomach with a shotgun. She says, the mother of this man is a friend of mine, indeed.

“Our lives have many eerie parallels.”

I wonderly-wonder what all of this means, and she goes on:

“The suicide note was seven pages long. It read: ‘Do not blame yourself, Mother. No human being could have saved my soul. You did your very best to quell the incurable sadness of tormented man. And now I will be tormented no more.’”

He slept with many women, she said, for reasons he probably didn’t understand. He felt achy and deep-dark-bad about it. He hopped from person to person, thinking, “Save me, won’t you? Won’t you please?”

No one did, no, not one of them.

“Couldn’t exist in this world. Too sensitive to be alive.”

I drove and drove.

Boy oh boy.

Ain’t that a rainy forecast.