Memoirs

I was reeling and nothing mattered. I couldn't help looking at my house in ruins and my family gone and not feel anything...like i was encased in ice and everything around me looked fuzzy and melting and unreal and anfractuous and all of it folded into a dream spun by an old wooden spinning wheel that was melting and thoughts crashed in my head of snow falling softly and a doll lying on a cobble stone street and a man with a beard and puffy lips laughing and a hand on a upholstered chair with yellow fingernails pulling at the fabric nervously and the sound it made and the wheel spinning and spinning and the fingernail scratching and the wheel and the hand and the flicker of a streetlight and the echoes of everything i know and knew. I woke up on my living room floor sometime later and I didn't know what time it was. Darkness filled the room. I had befriended a young Nazi soldier named Heinrich days before at Julian's (Jasper's twin brother) house, where we would sit and smoke crack and watch American football and listen to Devendra Banhart. This was a time when everything was in flux in Strasbourg. The buildings were the same, but the city was a foreign place, like a parallel universe. The Nazis controlled everything and people were just left waiting. Waiting to see what would happen next. Waiting. Faces frozen and sad. Vacant glares and slow, anxious steps, waiting for that moment when the Gestapo approached and dragged them away without consequence. Time itself had come undone and the air seemed thick with a muddied dread. I stopped going to school over a week before I found my parents and brother gone. I basically lived at Julian's, which he had transformed into an after-hours club for young Nazis who wanted to get high. But, it was just a matter of time before they would send us away. During the day, we would sit on the corner of Rue Charlotte in front of the dime store and sing doo-wop for change. At night, we would take the change and melt it down and smoke it, along with whatever else we could scrounge. I had developed open sores on my face and arms, most likely from dirty needles and such.

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				I was reeling and nothing mattered. I couldn't help looking at my house in ruins and my family gone and not feel anything...like i was encased in ice and everything around me looked fuzzy and melting and unreal and anfractuous and all of it folded into a dream spun by an old wooden spinning wheel that was melting and thoughts crashed in my head of snow falling softly and a doll lying on a cobble stone street and a man with a beard and puffy lips laughing and a hand on a upholstered chair with yellow fingernails pulling at the fabric nervously and the sound it made and the wheel spinning and spinning and the fingernail scratching and the wheel and the hand and the flicker of a streetlight and the echoes of everything i know and knew. I woke up on my living room floor sometime later and I didn't know what time it was. Darkness filled the room. I had befriended a young Nazi soldier named Heinrich days before at Julian's (Jasper's twin brother) house, where we would sit and smoke crack and watch American football and listen to Devendra Banhart. This was a time when everything was in flux in Strasbourg. The buildings were the same, but the city was a foreign place, like a parallel universe. The Nazis controlled everything and people were just left waiting. Waiting to see what would happen next. Waiting. Faces frozen and sad. Vacant glares and slow, anxious steps, waiting for that moment when the Gestapo approached and dragged them away without consequence. Time itself had come undone and the air seemed thick with a muddied dread. I stopped going to school over a week before I found my parents and brother gone. I basically lived at Julian's, which he had transformed into an after-hours club for young Nazis who wanted to get high. But, it was just a matter of time before they would send us away. During the day, we would sit on the corner of Rue Charlotte in front of the dime store and sing doo-wop for change. At night, we would take the change and melt it down and smoke it, along with whatever else we could scrounge. I had developed open sores on my face and arms, most likely from dirty needles and such. Next page