1985 (Prose Poem)

did you know, he said idly, running his finger down the sleeve of a mint vinyl copy of Brothers in Arms at the record shop, that 1985 was 40 years ago. just think on it. there are people who are middle aged now who were babes in arms when it was

40 years ago, and I was eleven, all thin limbs and long sunburned nose and wavering voice, getting used to bleeding and hurting on the regular. (actually I already knew about hurting, long before, but the bleeding was new). I was eleven and a nerd, long before that was something to wear with honour in the outer suburbs, growing under the shadow of the ferny mountains and watching Val Kilmer movies with my best friend on VHS every Friday night, trekking to Blockbuster in our high-waisted jeans and poodle perms that were in fashion

40 years ago, and here I was, eleven, sitting in my parents' searingly hot car waiting for my mother to come out of the shops, window down a little crack, rolling the dial on the radio and finding Crazy for You and nearly dislocating my finger hitting the Record button on the tape deck and high-fiving myself when I got all but the first three bars, a long age away and

40 years, sitting in an English classroom as my teacher reads aloud from Z for Zachariah, and thinking (always thinking) about nuclear bombs and what it would feel like if one hit my city and thinking that would probably happen soon (I was eleven), and wondering if Sting was right and the Russians loving their children too (which I, aged eleven, assumed to be true, because who doesn't love their children?) was going to be enough, and also thinking about time travel and robots and what I was going to eat for dinner and whether my body smelled weird, because I was eleven and that's what you do when you don't really know that one day this day will be

40 years ago, the scent of hot eucalyptus everywhere, everyone in the summer and autumn alerting like a hound dog to the merest whiff of smoke in the air (two years since Ash Wednesday, not nearly long enough to forget), cricket on the old tv with the broken dial that my mother was always talking about replacing but actually didn't replace until the decade clicked over, my father doing the ironing and yelling at the screen while I did my maths homework in front of the only working fan, the numbers swimming in front of my myopic eyes; even now, that memory,

40 years ago, makes my heart shrivel a little, feeling like a stupid child, a pointless awkward bookish child (I was eleven), for whom the numbers would never align, not

40 years ago, and not now, although time has brought some peace (what nature takes with one hand she gives with the other; words are my medium, and it has been a rich garden). So much has come to pass that I didn't expect, when I thought about the future, aged eleven;

40 years ago, I thought the world would be destroyed in fire, or, if it was somehow, miraculously, not, that it would keep getting better, that we would keep on climbing that thin and fragile ladder towards the light, growing into the sun of a new century, growing from that place

40 years ago, back when so many things were unperfected, but when we still thought (I still thought - I was eleven) that they might be perfectable, when we (I) still thought that the project of the future was something shared and understood; never expecting

40 years ago, that the future, when it came, would wear such dark and troubled robes, would stare at us with such cold and empty eyes, shrouding the next 40 years in such deep shadow.