It’s all too much

“I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now…Come further up, come further in!” –CS Lewis

Spoken by the magical creature Jewel at the end of Lewis’s The Last Battle, these words came to mind as I found myself in bed, deep within my grandmother’s basement. Being in my early twenties, I always find it bittersweet revisiting her house, on the one hand, it holds nostalgic significance but on the other I feel like I hit the reset button on my life, as if the past two decades have only led me back to the very beginning. But I digress, it was near pitch-black in the room, with the only illumination coming out of the ghostly-looking window in the corner — it was covered with thick satin drapes that made the moonlight eerie and violet. To be honest, I was starting to feel claustrophobic and a bit uneasy but luckily I had my German shepherd of nine years lying beside me, snoozing away. I reached out and laid my hand on her hide to make sure she was still there. Sure enough she was, and I felt instant relief as I ran my hands through her fur. Despite the creepy horror-movie atmosphere in the basement bedroom, there was always comfort to be found in that house. Even if the world outside was on fire and the tall coastal oaks in the surrounding area fell shattering to the earth, here at least I would find sanctuary.

My real childhood home, the home I had grown up in, had been sold years earlier I never met the owners but revisiting the outside years later, it was evident that they were vastly different people then we had been… even the bushes outside looked alien and unfriendly to me, as if they whispered to each other “Who is this stranger?” and I wanted to talk to them and explain, “No, you see I used to live here.”

My grandmother’s house, in this regard, was the rare example of something that defiantly refused the winds of change; virtually everything was exactly as I remembered when I was young. It had the same towering trees in the yard, the same oil paintings hanging in the hallway, the same tribal masks on the wall, and the same player piano in the basement. I began thinking about the constant flow of change that all things, living or dead, face, even this place.

Even the very earth is destined to one day be enveloped by an uncaring sun, and literally everything I know will pass away as a result. As I lay in the darkness I pondered what makes a certain place or object sentimental…would I mourn the loss all of my sanctuaries the same way I now mourn my house? Is everything that brings us waves of happiness doomed to one day dry up and become a riverbed of yesteryear?

I still keep a box of objects that links me to that childhood house: music, video games, random toys, and of course my Nintendo consoles all still live comfortably in my living space. When I turn them on I can see myself as a child on Saturday nights, with a smooth controller in my hand while on screen a small hero clad in green—not too much older than I was at the time, sailed the open seas, traveled to distance lands, vanquished an evil king, and saved a beautiful princess form certain destruction. It was pure bliss! The problems of my youth were swept away like a leaf in the wind whenever I turned that power button on. Beyond my bedroom door a whole world of grief laid in wait to face me but I was far too busy having adventures with my friends Link, Mario, Fox McCloud, Samus Aran and James Bond.

You could say that the memory of my house is still retained inside that little Nintendo console… but that’s just it. The memories and moments are retained but not perpetuated. Today I could play those games in their entire splendor, and my old friend Link would probably face little resistance as he cast down the evil king for the second time, completing all of his trials with the help of a much wiser adult player. But would it be the same?

The sad fact is, that I am no longer that boy — the world irreversibly has changed, and I cannot hope to feel exactly the same way as I did in that idyllic room years ago. I thought more of the objects I had dragged with me to college, and how in each individual way everything that was of some importance to me, tethered me to the past. Were they special to me then? Or are they just now taking on significance, like evidence found at a crime scene?

Take the music I listen to for instance, do I enjoy listening to those old Tears for Fears and Smiths CDs that litter my glove box because of their content? Or is it simply that I seek to relive those summer drives to the lake with my best friends, when the only itinerary for the day was throwing the cares of school out the window? Looking back on the cheap CDs I bought from that thrift store near my house, I see now that most of them are intrinsically worthless… especially in today’s age where I can listen to virtually any song or album for free on the Internet. But I don’t regret buying them — for a brief moment, they bring me back to halcyon times where college, serious relationships, and student debt are vague phantoms floating off beyond the horizon.

But here I am, I thought to myself, and the phantoms are real, and the past is past. The house was sold, my friends now live in different parts of the globe, and here I rest with the tiny fragments of our lives together in my hands. I felt sad in the darkness, nostalgic for a time that seemed unobtainable and far beyond me, the lyrics to the Beatle’s seminal, It’s All Too Much, were running through my mind;

“Floating down the stream of time, of life to life with me,

Makes no difference where you are or where you’d like to be

It’s all too much for me to take”

Here I was, alone and in the dark, lamenting the objects, places, and people of yesteryear and wishing that they would come back to me, when I should be looking forward to whatever tomorrow brings. It had been a hard year for me, and I was, for lack of a better term: “In the pits” for most of it, but at the time of writing this I feel for the first time, a tad optimistic. For a brief moment, without even the added assistance of a Nintendo 64 I now find myself feeling once again like that boy in green, sailing across the high seas… except now he’s no longer a boy. He is a man of twenty-one, and he’s smiling. My mind awash in deep thought finally resurfaced I rolled over and ran my fingers through my dog’s fur once more as I drifted off to sleep.