the green room

the room is green,

the light is changing,

the carpet like moss dappled with the sunlight coming through the screen.

.

someone is there with me:

we are playing a game, or I am, my small feet planted on the cool ground. Though they sit out of frame, there is the low murmur of someone talking (my mother? my father?)

.

outside, the lawn (backyard?) stretches away into oblivion,

brambles leering in a grimace at the border,

the whole wide world locked away behind their dark mouths.

.

in here, the floor is like that rough material (turf?) coating tennis courts, and there's the comforting scent of asbestos,

the sun dying on wood-paneled walls, melting over the worn couch where (grandma? aunt? uncle?) sits.

my fingers grasp at the stained wood of a low surface (coffee table?) and this single musty room (indoor porch?) is a paradise of anticipation.

at my feet lies a ball (or puzzle piece, wooden block, dice) and sharp awareness runs through me in waves like the motes of dust caught in the glow of the (setting?) sun.

.

there is not much to say. It's barely a memory, really, a collection of blurred images from not the beginning of my life exactly, but from the first moment my 3-year-old brain hit record.

it is the earliest fragment of consciousness, like scrap metal from an ancient civilization coming up in the tines of a net when cast into the deep murk of the subconscious-

less a memory than a snapshot,

less a truth than a fantasy (perhaps even a dream,

a lie)

this brief, blinking capture of a place I may well have never been.

it is inadmissible; it will not hold up in the most lenient court. there is nothing, in the end, I can tell you for certain but this:

.

I was happy.

.

in that place was my consciousness born, and it was there that I hope it goes when i die, the waiting room at the edge of the roaring static of eternal sleep.

.

I hope that when my winding life is done with me, it dumps me back there, in the last of the day's light, the screen letting in the barest scrap of air to tickle my weathered cheek as I tend to the light of my dying fire in that viridian twilight.

.

I hope I go out hearing the hum of the crickets in the faraway trees, the murmuring of that voice (my mother, my mother, my mother) as I drift out to the edge of oblivion, the waves lapping at my splintering faculties forming three words, three resounding syllables, a heartbeat that rocks me to sleep:

.

you are loved,

.

you are loved,

.

you are loved