Song of a Set Piece

School was always odd for me. I was ofteoften absent - often I’d already learned the things we were talking about, or whatever I was thinking about seemed more important. I performed well enough, but proving what I knew by engaging always seemed pointless in comparison to thinking up something new. When I did attend, I kept myself entirely detached, a distant cloud rarely brushing foglike against the hard boundaries of the earth.

Perhaps I remember how I felt about the moments that changed who I was better than the events themselves because of how detached I was. I don’t remember most of those moments now, buried under time and other memories, of course. But the feelings - I remember swelling anger, embarrasment, eagerness, and rarely, a sense of comfort and home. However, most of the strange moments from my schooling and childhood are things I only know of in stories I learned from the adults around me - mostly detailing the ways I inconvenienced them. What I really remember now are the little things worn into me by years of exposure.

I remember the texture of cinderblock walls, painted white in so many layers it exaggerates the unevenness even as it smooths it over: the perfectly smooth lines where I’d run my finger along the grout. I remember wishing it had more colours, and imagining I was drawing out some plant or beast or scene sketched out by rough, cubist lines.

I remember the river we dug, in the dirt beneath one of the soccer goal posts - I could probably draw its rough shape even now, 15 years hence, if asked. We planned it out - dams and tools and tunnels to hide it so no adult would see it to fill it in. We got in trouble for it constantly - “No digging! Fill it back in!” But the rain would wash the loose dirt out for us, anyways, and after I’d outgrown it and other first graders had taken over down the years, I heard the administrators gave in and bought shovels. I was always happy about that.

In every little memory, though, I remember my school buildings empty - I was so detached from the actions of the teachers and other students that in my memory I see through them, watching the buildings and the fields weather and change slightly over the years of different uses and short term projects - a garden put in in grade three, overrun by mint 2 years later, a leak in the roof slowly making its way towards the boy’s bathroom window. A tree limb bending and cracking slowly for months before the arborist is called to prune it. It’s slow, but you can see it all if you sit still enough.

I wish I’d known how to move when I realized the weathering was happening to me, too.