As a child I was often frightened of sleeping,
or of not being able to sleep—
the transition from waking to sleeping,
in any event, was fraught.
Those nights, my mother would help me
by instructing me to think of things I liked
that I would do the following day,
things I was looking forward to.
In this way, she tried to make time more continuous for me
and to associate its passage with pleasure.
I felt the weight of my mother’s body on the mattress
and her hand resting on my chest above the covers—
I thought of the park,
of a particular hill in the great meadow I always liked to arrive at
because it seemed to me to be the park’s center.
I thought of eating, of the things I liked that I would eat the following day
when I was hungry again—
possibly a frozen waffle.
All that was ugly and discordant fell away,
forming the background against which this string of episodes could shine,
eerily brightly, like the grass in the light of a gathering storm.
Years later—
in a period of desperation
when I frequently awoke in terror—
I tried to recall my mother’s exercise.
What could I look forward to?
It was a perverse question to ask
in the face of a nearly annihilating dread.
I could imagine comparable pleasures,
eating, the way the morning light colored
the stone of certain houses in my neighborhood—
but these pleasures were now scattered, incoherent,
decorative fragments in a larger, more sinister structure
I could not easily apprehend.
It had been my mother’s presence, in part,
which had made the exercise so successful.
Now, in a sick inversion,
when I woke in the night I felt a presence very near me,
as close and substantial as my mother had been,
but which intended me great harm.
When I turned the light on,
I saw my apartment around me,
decorated to my taste.
My childhood room was not—
the walls were lavender,
the bedspread a gaudy floral pattern
with a gold rope trim.
I’d had nightmares then, a recurring one,
in which I was being searched for by a band of men
from whom I was hiding, unaccountably,
on top of the bed.
It was too late to change position—they were nearly at the door—
but it was also certain I would be spotted immediately.
The dream always ended before they entered the room;
they were perpetually climbing the stairs.
So I knew dread.
Of course I did, or there would have been no need
for my mother’s exercise.
I turned the light off again.
A light rain was falling;
I opened the window to let in a breeze.
There was a large tree outside my window,
as there had been outside my childhood bedroom.
I lay down and tried again to remember the exercise.
As I did, my mind kept catching on certain unremarkable details;
I became diverted.
Things which held no charm at the time,
to which I was absolutely indifferent
or which provided the backdrop
for certain unhappy episodes—
the school gymnasium, a hated friend’s
backyard, the comforter with the braid trim—
I found, when they emerged in this way,
were accompanied with an undeniable sweetness.
Or, rather, this way of remembering—
not following a thread, but instead moving about
among the relics of a certain period—
gave me a feeling of ease and well-being,
akin to the one I had been searching for.
As a child I had very little past.
I pressed up against the box of the future—
it was empty.
I believed even less now in the future—
but the past, I had to acknowledge,
had bloomed like a cloud of ink.
All this did little to reconcile me to the state of things,
but it did sedate me—
which, I knew, was the true and entire purpose of my mother’s exercise.