The Dot Matrix of Nowhere

This is my grandparents’ village. My village too, now, I guess.

It’s there. See the specks? All 5 of them? I swear, that’s a village. People live there. Really small, backwoods people. (I can say that, as none of them — or likely, the next 3 generations of their descendants — will ever master a computer to the point of reading some nobody’s blog.)

The bigger speck in the middle is the pub, where I am trapped, day and night, until either A) a meteorite hits us, B) the nuclear power plant on Anglesey melts us into gooey mounds of eyeballs and testicles, or C) some lotto-winning knight comes and rescues me. Or none of the above: I finally get up the gumption to leave the old-timers and have a life.

This is the village where my mom grew up. The village where she grew up and then ran away from as soon as she could legally buy the tickets to get the hell out. The village she'd told me about, that hangdog look in her eyes, all throughout my own childhood, until the accident. Until I'd been forced to move there myself, with the parents she'd missed but hadn't been willing to stay with.

By 15, the only big city my mom had ever seen was Chester. What, you’ve never heard of it? Neither has anyone else who doesn’t live in North Wales or the North of England. By 15, I'd seen Mexico City, Rio. I'd climbed Machu Piccu with my parents, tagged along on my dad's photography trips down the Amazon. I'd walked down the streets of Caribbean islands ripped apart by hurricanes. My dad let me smoke a cigar once in Cuba (that shit stays in your stomach for days), and we camped for two months in Patagonia while he read to me and mom every night from some famous travel book.

And then they died, and I came here, and everything paused and went to gray.

Let's open old wounds, shall we?

Tal asked me something today, something about my parents, and I got all smarmy and 2.0 and told him to just read about it on my blog. Everything’s on here, right? I mean, I’m not so painfully honest that I put my menstrual calendar on here (F that), but I’m not really a secret-keeper.

Except it wasn’t here. I looked and searched and though surely it must be here. I even sent a kinda nasty email to Blogger about lost posts (sorry, Blogger, not your fault after all). Turns out I never wrote it down. Never sent it into the cloud. Which, by the way, is more likely to resemble a cloud of mosquitos shaped like 1s and 0s and buzzing like gangbusters around your head, than it is to look like a fluffy white wonderland. Twitter’s marketing guys are full of shit.

Ah. Avoidance tangent. Right on.

Anyway, Tal asked how my parents died. I didn’t want to tell the story again. I never want to tell the story again. Who would want to tell that story, over and over? Why do people always want to know? I always wonder why people ask that question. Does it matter to our relationship that they know how I became a fucking orphan? Does it make a difference if it was a murder-suicide, an earthquake, or some freakish cancer that takes people out two at a time? Will they like me more or less if they find out my parents were eaten by mutant iguanas?

So here’s the story. It was a car wreck. I wasn’t there. I don’t know the gory details. I wasn’t old enough to identify the bodies, and my parents weren’t into gawk-at-the-corpse funerals. I never saw them dead.

The news media told me what happened, what the news media thought happened. Taid tried to keep me from reading them, but Taid doesn’t know much about the www. The news, the tawdry little 3-paragraph articles, one the day after, and one when the police report came out, said they lost control on a wet road, hit a guard rail in a weak spot, tumbled about 30 feet, and hit a tree. No explosions. No race to a river to outrun goons with guns. No 007 on their tail. Was Dad drunk? they wondered. Were they fighting? Was he on meds or had he just found out about my mom’s torrid affairs with other tall dark and Latin men besides himself?

I used to get angry reading this stuff. Used to scream bloody murder at the boys in the village when they assumed there had to be some big fucking story behind it, that my parents were like TV couples, just sacks of shit and bile who once, a long time ago, had a crazy, bitch-ass day and said some offhanded vows. Because they weren’t. They fought and nagged and snapped at each other, but they loved each other. At least as far as I knew.

It was just an accident. Maybe Dad reached too far to change the radio, took his eyes off the road, his hand slipped on the wheel. Maybe Mom poked him in the ribs like she always did when he was being cheeky, and he flinched. A flinch could do it. A flinch, conducted in a __-ton vehicle, at 50 m.p.h., at the wrong spot in the road, can kill you. Death has played crazier tricks.

So that’s why I’m here, Tal. That’s why I’m stuck on an island in North Wales, with the sheep and the burial mounds.