1. In My Bedroom

One of my early childhood memories – I might have been four or six or eight, I don’t know, but certainly no older than eight; I think younger – is of lying in bed, alone in the dark, thinking about death. (I was a scream at the birthday parties.) I say alone in the dark because I was not alone in the room. On a twin bed parallel to my own, only feet away – after the whispered teases and tortures that are youthful brotherly love had ebbed into silence – lay my older brother, Jeff. Was he awake as I was, thinking thoughts, perhaps, like mine? I don’t know.  Loneliness exists most profoundly in the knowledge of other people.  So as a very young child, barely at the start of my life, I was already concerned with my end. (more…)