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Show in my memories. After all, we were moving to Hawaii so why would we be driving? A plane seems much more likely. Perhaps it was my babysitter in Virginia who gave me the terrarium and I was eight. Perhaps it was in Seattle, but maybe it was a birthday present. Perhaps I only dreamed the terrarium. Casting, casting, casting back I work to remember the car we owned, how many siblings I had, the way my mother wore her hair, any detail that will help me to attach the terrarium to a particular place, in hopes my past travels better than the plants. In the end, there is only the image of a short-lived terrarium sweating in ajar with an orange lid. Other empty spaces fill the nine months we lived in Seattle. My father likes to tell the story of when I came home from sleeping at Lori's house, a night spent spying on her mother and her mother's boyfriend having sex on the couch. What makes the story funny for my father is that I could only describe what I saw, didn't have the word "sex" to name the humping, thrashing bodies. I remember nothing of that night, though looking back at it helps me understand the men who haunted our horse play. It is a non-memory for me, rather than a mis-remembered one. I trust my father that the story I tell is the one he remembers, but I can't carry it. I try. I try and conjure up some image of two people on the couch in a living room, seen through the crack of the door, the sounds they might have made, not unlike my snorting horse maybe, and the way Lori and I giggle at the edge of the room. But I have nothing. Memory slips and slides and rolls under the couch, refusing to be held. We wheel through the night sky like an untethered space needle. Without photographs to help me, stories come to represent all of childhood rather than a particular moment. Was I ten or 112 |