Pamela

Every bench in Central Park has a story, all beginning with a dedication. This one's :

"Pamela"

The name of my Great Aunt Pat's only daughter. Her son, Alex, had the same birthday as me - September 10th - only his was one year ahead of mine though we awakened that summer in tandem.

I'm miserable here, in this body; vibrating at a fever pitch, in debt with a career that a slew of 26 year olds wouldn't trade me for.

Wine helps.

Pamela, like her mother, daughter, sister, grand-daughter, grandson, and great nephew retained a proclivity for alcoholism.

I want out. Badly. Or at least some kind of temporary relief.

So much so, I've been ideating an alien abduction. A life force curious enough (and advanced enough) to induce, energetically, a coma... to sleep perchance to dream - full stop.

Whether I possess a mind worth studying, here or otherwise, remains to be seen.

Pamela and her mother smoked like chimneys. Pat and Derek (her husband) ran a pub. The two cared little about settling tabs and the Pub, like Pat, went prematurely. Pamela was my age when it happened. When she lost her mother to breast cancer.

I'd only met Pat a handful of times; the last memory I hold of her was from a special trip Gran insisted we take after Pat's prognosis. It was unbeknownst to me, but at 8 or 9 I felt again what I had only one other time before.

Shortly before my Mother's Father, Paul, passed of cancer, he took me to his favorite spot, a lake beside a mountain you could only get to via four wheeler. It's one of a handful of pictures I hold, unprinted, of my childhood. Paul died three weeks later. No one told me he was sick but I wasn't surprised when he passed. Children, I believe, possess a certain sentience, as if the ushering out of a life force is a responsibility assigned to those who have been most recently ushered in.

Derek, could've died of a broken heart, would've maybe if it weren't for Pamela and the promise of grandchildren.

My last memory of him exists on the same day I'd met the newest member of our family, Isla. Stephen (the son of my grandmother's other sister, Marie) had a child with a woman whose name I cannot conjure but who forced Stephen to break his mother's heart and elope in Madagascar.

In any case, Derek, a jolly corpse in italics, trembled for the newborn and the two found peace in each other.

When the eldest of our family and the youngest first met, there was a communion. There was an celebration that they had not missed one other and the two held each other like a body holds water.

Pamela, 8 feet away smoking a cigarette, ashes it and sniffles strategically, perhaps hoping it would keep us from understanding how deeply she missed her mother.

When Paul, Pat, and Derek died people cried. I do now at funerals but then, being a child, I tried to only because I felt I was supposed to. Before their burials, while they were still alive when my family would finally convey to me the prognosis, I would understand, hug them goodbye (that's usually when I'd cry) but felt all the while that the two of us were in on the same secret.

Perhaps the most exhausted of us, those who have more reason than most to spite their skeletons, can gain clarity like children do, the closer we get to each other. Perhaps feeling close to that threshold, through ideation, prognosis, or that of another, grants a similar perspective.

That if we can find the time to keep from writhing long enough, the time we understand, is a gift.