08/06/2025 | tate-abrahamson | #from_life

I remember a winter when I attended a Christmas party with my parents. I was young and it was a party thrown and attended by my dad’s work colleagues. My parents insisted I not stand on their shadows all night, but rather join the other children. This is where my memory fractures. Perhaps it blends with other similar memories, perhaps there were other parties in other years. But for some reason, they’ve all, more or less, converged into this one, shattered memory. In one version, the room all the children gathered in was upstairs. It was a game room of sorts and I was feverishly jealous of the two kids who lived there. There were video games and pillows and many many children of various ages. My memory ends at long legs of an adult standing in the room. In another version, this children’s room is downstairs and is not as dark and there are no video games. There are various rooms that we go through, me and the other children. I think this version was a dream. In another version, I stand in the kitchen behind my mother. I watch our reflections in a glass door as she makes conversation while I, to her dismay, tug on her sleeve. I want one of the festive cookies on the table and I want her attention and I want to leave. I don’t want to join the other kids, or perhaps I’ve just come from the room upstairs. I don’t remember too much, but this Christmas sticks out me in various ways. I remember the darkness. The darkness that we arrived in and left in. The darkness of the wood inside the house. The darkness, or rather dimness of the lights. This memory is shrouded in darkness and warmth. The edges are frayed and the center is faded. One detail of this party remains in focus, there was a panther prowling the area that night. I pictured it lurking in the woods that surrounded us, its black coat both melting into the shadows and standing out against the snow. The idea of the panther delighted me. I hoped that we would come across it. Shivers of fear and anticipation raced through my body as I followed my parents out the car. Ideas of mystery and pink curiosity filled my head as I contrasted The Pink Panther with powerful jaws and gleaming claws of a giant cat. Another detail remains clear. We didn’t come across the panther that night.

Like me, this memory is somewhat nonsensical. I’ve spent a lot of time this past year looking backwards and I’ve found that my vision is increasingly blurry. This has left me increasingly terrified of forgetting things. There is a past, vast and dark, that looms behind me. I feel that it’s threatening to swallow my present whole. To catch the fleeting glances of yesterday in its abysmal claws. The panther of that Christmas party has unhinged its jaws and eaten my past. It’s dark fur is impenetrable by light, so much so that it functions as a black hole. I remember only the shreds of what my panther has left behind. Scraps of memories that end abruptly or are carved out in the center. I scratch glimpses of my days on crumbled paper, I play conversations back on loop. I try to keep the people I used to know and used to love out of the panthers grasp, by keeping them in front of me. It used to protect me, this panther. It used to eat the memories that hurt me. But its appetite became insatiable and it prowls at the edges of my life just as it did that Christmas, eager for more memories. It takes the good ones with the bad and leaves me with darkness. My mind is poorly lit and I think that this Christmas party stands out to me because it has come to represent my state of mind. It’s fractured and unsure, dimly lit, haunted at the corners, and plagued with a panther whose stomach growls so loudly that the radio frequencies are interrupted and my head splits in two.

My parents chatter muddles, as if I’m hearing them from under the surface of a lake. The radio crackles as my heavy eyes close. A report plays, the panther has not yet been caught. Proceed with caution. My head pounds relentlessly, a budding migraine is flashing through my brain like lightning. I dose off to sleep as darkness chases our car down the highway. Quiet Christmas carols jingle above the surface of the lake as I sink deeper and deeper.