"There Was a Dream Here"
A revision of an essay published about ten years ago called "Shenmue"
Disclaimer: I’m revising this as I go section by section, trying to figure what still works and what doesn’t. It was originally published with FLEAS ON THE DOG LIT somewhere around 2017 or 16 I believe. It’s fun to try and see what I make of it now.
We’ll be here a while, I think!
He’s heard this one before. How many times was this now? Three?
Four.
Does the ten-year-old have the strength of will to insert himself into a new friend group four times over? The short answer is no.
In February of 2001, his father props his feet, bare and thick with the smell of leather and stress, on an ottoman he bought from an Amish man at a swap meet. When he is older, the ten-year-old will wonder what an Amish man was doing in an open-air market in Fremont, California, and it will trouble him to wonder how the Amish man got there in the first place.
The footstool/ottoman reeks of cedar and lacquer. He tries not to think about his first day of school at his fourth new school. He tries not to think about school at all, but it is there, and it presses down on his chest. He squelches the urge to say something to his parents then—too content with their new apartment and new Amish footstool to want to bother them with ten-year-old boy problems.
But it makes his eyes water, and the knurl sitting in his throat harder to keep down. All of it feels like so much as of late. He doesn’t know how to say any of this. That he feels small, that he feels the world growing larger and heavier with every new place, every new apartment, and every new school. That he’s beginning to sense that it all moves in spite of him wishing it would stay still and feel like home again.
The boy watches his parents admire their new purchase in their new apartment. The father smiles at the mother and gives the tufted woodbox a hefty rap on its side. The wood creaks against the brass hinges of the top cover.
“This thing’s gonna go with us wherever we go. It’s built to last,” the father muses.
The boy doesn’t want to go anywhere else, not again, not ever-- but, a want is just that. A thing in his chest that he doesn’t know how to make real. He goes to his room with words he doesn’t know how to say still in his mouth.
The ten-year-old’s room is shared with his younger brother. Nuzzling the far corner of the bedroom is their bed: a twin-sized hand-me-down that’s been getting smaller with each move. Frequently, the ten-year-old’s leg ends up dangling and numb each morning when he wakes up. More often now, he sleeps on the floor in front of their television, another family hand-me-down. A Zenith tube that pitches and rings when he turns it on. He stays up later than ten-year-olds should just so he can play his beloved and scrappy video game console--a Sega Dreamcast. His Sega Dreamcast. It’s become the only time he feels like there’s nothing else but him and the place his favorite video game takes him.