Tokyo to Tijuana: Gabriele Departing AmericaSills, Steven David Justin
General
Tokyo to Tijuana: Gabriele Departing America
Sills, Steven David Justin
Fiction
He dressed himself. As he put on his socks, he did it with the mentality of a
small child who still felt newness in the sensation. Sexual glutton of adult
games, introvert, a man perpetually weakened and wary in ways unbecoming to a
man, he still was a little wiser than most on a couple issues. He was cognizant
that as an effect of adolescent awakenings an adult often was so obsessed with
being in the company of others that finding any degree of happiness could not
occur without them. He was a lot different in that respect: influences by
hormones to sociability were thwarted by his wariness that gave him back his
childhood innocence. Although he was an adult he could still play alone albeit
uneasily. Also they, the unwary ones, were so fixated on gaining bigger and
more complex pleasures in their gross gluttony to have everything before death
that the marvel of air rushing into one's lungs or the feel of a spring breeze
brushing against one's face was lost to them entirely. He wanted the remnant of
early childhood--the memories of strong aromas, sights, and sounds as his
senses depicted them-- to live in him and not be the cause of mourning. He
wanted to find the traces of deceased family in those early days and be able to
glance back onto those tenuous decaying remnants of memory with a sense of
happiness at what was once there. Still, even with the earliest and most benign
memories furthest removed from the tragic end, such a feat was difficult to
master. Everything in the mind of a 5-year-old from the smells of greased
telephone polls to the sounds of the school bus that picked up his older
7-year-old sister, and everything in the mind of a 10-year-old from getting his
first b-b gun to spending his first time away from family at a summer camp was
like walking barefoot on sharp gravel. This, however, was better than having
his entrails hacked out of him in that shock of finding his father dangling
from a noose in the workroom of his basement. Thinking that early memories were
even more benign than the present, he knew that it was only his thinking that
made them painful. He judged that he was the source of his misery and with
application he would find a way to plant himself in their fecund topsoil and
burgeon into the future. His childhood memories were mostly American in origin
although it was difficult to isolate the Korean episodes from that of the
latter. After the school bus would rush in front of a road near the trailer
park and whisk his sister away, his mother would pursue her early morning
exercises in front of the television and he would emulate her movements. He
remembered loving the thought of catching lightning bugs like his sister and
the neighbor children and his repulsion towards it when his mother stated that
they were "God's little creatures." He remembered getting lost in a store,
feeling tiny among lady mannequins, and being nearly hit by a car as he played
in the street.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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