The Child Inside

I don’t mind those first few cold days of winter. I think the pristine whiteness of that first measurable snowfall is beautiful – and the newly white world serene and breathtaking. I like the way the sound cracks in the cold, clear, crisp air and I love to look at the skeletons of the summer trees when they are dressed it their covering of ghost-white snow.

My mind’s vision of snowy hills and wistful flakes drifting through the winter twilight is both a happy one and a sadly nostalgic one. Never again will I be a small boy dragging a red sled behind me – and standing at the top of a mighty hill, looking down toward the bottom with trepidation and excitement. Never again will I be a young child with frozen fingers and toes, running home to glowing, warm house and a sweet cup of hot chocolate – that tastes even sweeter now because I know my mom made it for me from scratch. It was not the instant kind from a pouch.

With a profound and melancholy yearning, I picture myself a child, lacing up his new ice skates, sitting next to a warm, blazing, bonfire. As surely as this movie has been indelibly etched in some deep, untouchable corner of my mind, so have the happy sounds of laughter of the children gliding by me. I can hear their skates making clear sharp sounds as they slide and scrape the smooth and strangely-blue ice. These sounds are recorded in somewhere in another almost hidden sector of my mind. Wherever these vibrant memories are stored in my mind, whenever I play this back this scene in my mind, the soundtrack is always synchronized perfectly with the movie that I watch in my memory.

A shiver runs through me as I recall those happy days and a deep, dark sorrow grips me for the days I can never live again.

Winter is an amalgam of happy and sad, of yearning and contentment, of sweet and bitter. I wonder how I became what I am and I wonder what I’ll be years from now. I wonder if the reflections of the past are somehow honed by time into something they never were. Maybe what is too painful to remember our minds simply choose to erase. Maybe it is the laughter and happy times I remember most easily. Maybe those sad, dark, and bitter memories become more and more difficult to recall after time has had a chance to massage and erode them. Maybe my mind works its magic secretly, and unknown to me, it has been busying itself filtering, eroding and erasing. Maybe the day will come when I won’t be able to recall the bitter, sad, hurtful memories at all anymore. Maybe its a the natural filter of time at work and maybe all I am and all I will ever be is filtered by my perceptions of the memories I can recall most easily and not so much by those which are faded and difficult to remember.

I don’t think I want those bad memories filtered so much. I want to remember the dark, hurting, sad days too. I’m not sure why – it just seems they are as much a part of me as the happy ones. I think I am the sum of them all; I am the sum of the happy and the sad. I am the sum of the bitter and the sweet, of the bad and the good, of the morose and the sublime.

Today, though, I am the boy with the red sled and the shiny new ice skates. Having long since said goodbye to summer, and with autumn struggling to stave off the hard, biting winds of winter, I will look out the window today waiting for those first few flakes of snow. When I see them I will run outside and look up at the sky and catch a snowflake on my tongue.

There will always be a child inside me; it is the child inside the man. And, I love the gifts he gives me too much to ever let him go.