Earliest Memories

[Larry]

I think it started with a parrot.
In my minds eye I can see that parrot, or at least what I think is a parrot...might have been a Cockatoo or some other domesticated bird.

I was about 2 1/2 to 3 years old. I lay in my bed at the Highlands St. house.
It was dark outside and for some reason there wasn't any curtains on my window. I think we had just moved there. I had woke up for some reason...I don't know why.

I look out that window and there is a bird....somebodies lost parrot my Dad would tell me later....just sitting there staring at me from the bricks of the chimney.
I lay there motionless but curious at first. It looks away a few times but brings it's stare right back to me. I remember very little detail of the bird. Mostly its stare.

I think I remember the terror spreading slowly. I yelped for my father, might have yelped for my mother, but my Dad came in. I was in a panic, but too young to know how to fight or flee.

I don't remember so well how the conversation went. I want to say that his tone was intolerant, but my memory might be jaded from all the chaos of my teen years.

Anyway, like I had mentioned, he said it was probably someone's lost parrot and then hung a blanket over the window. I think he tried soothing me and telling me it was all right. I would whimper myself to sleep.
I have virtually no memory of my mother at this time. She wouldn't show up in my memories until the D St. house. 
She was probably busy with my younger brother at the time. He would  just be being born then.
I vaguely remember sharing a room with him there.
But memories are funny things. Just as I was writing this it occurred to me that there would be no sensical reason for there to be a chimney adjacent to my bedroom window.
I don't know....maybe it was a dream.

The final memory from this house still affects me to this day.
At different points in my life I've tried to explain it away as an omen or sometimes a dream. And more recently, a trauma induced hallucination or maybe some kind of dissociative episode.
Maybe it was all of them. I don't think I'll ever know.

I was about the same age and in the same room. This may have even been before the "parrot incident".
 It was dark and again I was awake for reasons I can't remember.

I was staring at the ceiling, up at the round light cover.
There were these things flying around it. Maybe five or six of them.
Angels, I would reason when I remember my first impression of them.
They were heads. They had hair or some kind of material gently floating behind them as they swirled and looped around the light cover....almost smoke like, but decidedly solid.
They were mostly in monochrome....various shades of grey. If there was any color it was faded and faint.
I think they were whispering my name. I don't think they made any other sound but that slightly disturbing whispering.

At first I couldn't see their faces and found them to be a curiously  peaceful presence. I was thoroughly entranced....they were beautiful and wondrous beings. Eerily graceful in their weightless flight. Something I'd never seen before and could not comprehend.
 But there was a physical response....a tensing as I analyzed the situation in my young  inexperienced little mind. I think my body was preparing me to be scared while I was entranced in curiosity.

But then I began seeing their faces.

Their faces were wretched. Contorted, wrinkled, ghostly faces with facial expressions that ranged from malevolent to aloof. They seemed to take turns staring at me while they whispered my name and swirled and maneuvered above me in graceful horror.

I was utterly horrified. Utterly frozen with terror. I could not move, not a single muscle. If felt the unmoving weight of my body, tingling with adrenaline. I couldn't even blink. I could not speak. I could not scream. Mortified. Frozen in place with my racing, panicked thoughts.
 All I could do was watch and wish really really hard that my Dad would come in and make them go away. I really just wanted my Dad. I just wanted them to go away. I hadn't misbehaved, why was this happening me?

I don't remember how long this went on but I do remember, just before sleep over took me, that I was desperately trying to hold on to that first impression that they might be peaceful and that would make them let me be.
That if I wished hard enough that none of this was actually happening.

I've never told this story to anyone.

I think I feel comfortable telling it to all of you because you're coming from the assumption that I'm already a whack job before you even read this.

Like I've said, I've tried to reason this away. It has been frustrating for me as I like to think that I'm a highly logical person. None of this makes sense in a highly logical world.

I have always, in the back of my mind, entertained the thought that this was a declaration of possession. A malevolent spirit announcing his presence.
The decimation of my potential and a cursed sickness left in its place.

I believe I found its festering remains in the words "Maladaptive Daydreaming".

I think those "ugly angels" foretold my future.
 The curious peace of the DD's. The anguish and anxiety of the truth of DD's. And the final prayer for mercy from the DD's.


I don't know. Maybe I'm being a little melodramatic. After all it could have been a dream. It could have been a DD. I'm not really sure.

I would like to believe it was all a bad dream.
But I've seen them. Sometime in the first decade of 2000. My wife was watching some goof a** horror movie. And there they were on my TV screen. Exactly as I'd remembered them...
Somebody else had seen them too, breathed digital life into their grotesque forms, and put them on the silver screen. To share with the whole world "our" nightmare.
I don't remember the name of the movie. I might have dissociated when I saw them. I think I was disturbed when I saw them. Maybe there's a part of me that doesn't want to remember the name of the movie, so I don't have to see them again.
 So that I don't have to relive the experience with renewed vividness.

When the misery of my pathetic  being reaches a certain point in the course of life's  events, I always think of them and the tattered ruins of my life and what might have been.

These are the most significant of my early memories. 
I have others, like running from my Dad and having the bright idea to jump to the top shelf of the closet while screaming "I did it on purpose" because I couldn't pronounce "accident" and getting my a** beat twice as hard for my troubles after I  learned the physical impossibility of my plan and got caught.

Believe it or not, these early memories are the least disturbing of all that I posses. The fit hits the shan when we move to the D St. house.
I'm probably going to hold off on the other memories until I can address them in therapy.
Freaking out and losing my job isn't on my to do list. :)

In real life this the point where I pass a little gas with a straight face and change the subject.
But this isn't real life, it's a blog.
So I'll just pass a little gas and stop typing. ;)

Thanks for reading.