Master Lego Builder

Have you ever heard an infant cry?

Tiny torso rapidly and fully concaving and convexing.

For hours.

Pumping one long, unbroken wail. Perfect breath control with the abdominal support and unconstrained throat that public speakers, actors, and singers pay thousands of dollars to relearn what they once did unconsciously.

I try.

Fill the deepest parts of my lungs,

and send out a rising amplitude of vibrations ricocheting off rushing air molecules,

Vocal cords splinter.

The release too spontaneous, too raw, too volitionally purposeless. Ten seconds of abandon and for the next two days, shards scrape against shards, painful and tight, producing harsh speech. Nine years of theatre training could not protect me, could not remind or re-teach me.

I, probably when learning to sleep in darkness and to tinker in dayness, began to manage life. To fracture the continuum of time into decades, years, weeks, milliseconds. To refashion an intact whole into, not a stream of moments, but crystallized building blocks of tiny arrows pointing towards the next Big Life Goal, never a circle complete in itself as though I were the Master Builder of my own Lego world.

Give a Lego to an infant and she’ll put it in her mouth, using the most sensitive part of her body to touch a small piece of this world. A little part, building on top of, beside, underneath, behind and two feet away from other little parts, all assembling this Big World with never space between. Even that is filled with air molecules or radiation or carcinogens or memory or maybe some residue of grace. Then gum to edge, plastic to soft, wet pinkness, she’ll throw it, having tasted it and moved on.

Being decades removed from infanthood, this postulation, like my Lego world, could be nothing but a Romantic construct. For I, just as much as the next person, project ideals onto the places I cannot return. Because then there exists a time when I was good, a time when I could not have done any better than what cannot be undone. And no one can tell me differently. Because they, too, cannot remember. Being so distant and universally forgotten, these ideals repose safe from memory.

Now, when I scream, I break things. In abandon, I break. And there was a time when I didn’t, a time when I could scream, unbroken, for hours. Sometimes, it feels good to taste the wreckage.

An acquaintance once told me that his heart had to break for it to open.

Maybe it’s something like that.

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