My first memories of conscientiousness are of being laid down in my crib for an afternoon nap, clothed only in my diaper it was so very warm

These are my feelings engendered by the separation from my mother, and a lack of visual input from the world of wonder and discovery

There was a jagged crack in the plaster ceiling above my head that was the only image I could focus on

The crack had many crooked legs, some sorter others longer leading to a central hub, the lines of striation, no real form but abstract

I kept trying to make some sort of sense, some cemetery to the crack to give it form in my imagination

Each successive time I was laid down for a nap, my mind wandered back to the crack in the ceiling

There it was again, challenging my mind to make some form of it, to give it meaning and beauty

Try as I could to make something wonderful out it, it resisted all efforts and imagination I could muster

It had become an anathema to all my efforts, like trying to make sense out of a reflection across two parallel mirrors

Then one day the riddle of the crack took on a more sinister guise, one that began to form into a threat of malevolence

In my desire to make sense out of the crack, it grew into the only shape it could assume, having no beauty or cemetery

My restless inquiring mind made its formlessness into the one thing left to my imagination, it made a void of chaos into an ugly monstrosity

As this darkness grew in my mind, so to did its threat in nature, filling me with a nameless dread

Soon I was crying my eyes out for mother reassuring arms, though its newly perceived menace seemed to loom ever larger in my mind

My mother came to my rescue eventually quelling my overactive imagination, but this will remain my first memory of consciousness

More primly though, having only known my mothers love, it was my first known notion of the emotion called fear

© Keith Stewart