Sunlight

I don’t know whether I was four then or five, whether it was fourteen years ago, thirteen, or fifteen. I think it was a kindergarten event, a fair, maybe, because there were lots of things there, and lots of adults. My mother was there too, but I can’t remember what she looked like then, what she was wearing, where she stood, whether she was holding my hand. All of it has disappeared. My father might have been there too, or he might not. But I remember the light that day. The sunlight was bright, gold mixed with white, shining on my face and on several glass vases. The vases held water, and there were colorful things floating in it. I had never seen them before. They were transparent, red, blue, green, and yellow, possibly purple too. After the sunlight passed through the glass and the water, they lit up one by one too. I couldn’t make out their shapes, but they may have been round. I thought they were flat pieces of colored transparent plastic, but if they really were pieces of plastic, why didn’t they turn over? Something flat floating in water ought to face me sometimes, turn sideways sometimes, become a thin line sometimes. But these didn’t do that. No matter how I looked at them, they were still round patches of color, suspended in the water, with no thickness, no front or side. I don’t know how long I watched them there. Only later did I learn they were water beads. When the tiny pellets are soaked in water, they gradually absorb it and swell into transparent balls. Of course they have volume. It is just that, when they are submerged, the transparent parts blend into the water around them. As a child, I couldn’t see the balls, only the color they left behind. It has been over ten years since then, yet somehow I still remember. Now, if you asked me to recall an ordinary Tuesday when I was fifteen, I probably couldn’t tell you anything. A dinner I ate at fourteen, coming home from school one day at thirteen, an afternoon soon after I arrived in Germany when nothing in particular happened—all of them are gone. Even with many things I know for certain happened, I can no longer say I really “remember” them. I know I went there. I know I knew that person. I know that thing happened that year. But these things no longer have pictures. They are only a few sentences, as if someone else had told me about them. I connect them with “later,” “then,” “that year,” so they still seem like a complete past. What has really remained is a few disconnected things. A few fish, red, water-filled eyes, a painting, and the colored circles in several glass bottles at kindergarten. I probably would not have thought this way when I was little. I might have thought a person’s life would always stay behind them, like a house. Three years old was one floor, four added another, then five, six, seven, and on upward. At eighteen, a person would be standing on the eighteenth floor, with more than ten floors below them still intact and holding them up. Now, though, it is getting harder for me to think of myself as a house. Sometimes I think a person is more like a balloon. A balloon floats in the air, a very thin plastic string hanging below it. The string might once have been very long, but parts have broken off. In some places only a very short piece remains, and below that there is nothing.