July 5th writing exercise: I don't remember

I don't remember: I don't remember my Dad saying goodbye to me the many times he left as I was a child, before & after the divorce. I don't remember being born, being compressed in a space that I didn't fit for 26 some-odd hours -- I don't remember my first kiss, I don't think, unless it was that one girl I hated in first grade out under those 3 enormous trees that sat in the grass outside the 1st-graders rooms, the ones that were also on my block, and had paired winged seeds. They've cut them all down. She had foofy little skirts, and her underwear was constantly visible.

I don't remember: fish -- fishwives. My first fishwife. Anything of that sort.

I don't remember: orange fishes, orange oceanic fishes staring out at me from amongst kelp, and how I felt them, underwater exploring for the first time and underwater for so long I was finally arousing suspicions that I was part fish, or dolphin. Or how nothing under there, under the swells, under the greendark water, seemed to treat me any differently as they would a seal, or lumbering manatee. And how the eelgrass tickled my leg slimily and I got scared & realized how much I couldn't see with a mask on and how much this looked like 1,000 leagues under the sea, or batman and how there were always monsters, or bad guys in James-bond underwater viper machines out to kill you when you were down here -- and sharks -- I'd forgotten all about sharks, and suddenly my fascination with what was right on the bottom below me, amidst the eelgrass and red algae that clung to the rock and hid all sorts of interesting aquatic life, vanished, and now I was interested in keeping an eye on that vast sandy-grey-blue that you saw when you looked out towards the barren sea, and how a huge shark could lumber out of that grey like a bear out of a wood, or worse yet, streak out like a cheetah after an antelope, and how I was a big, soft, alien & stupid piece of pink meat floating like a chunk of bait amidst a plane of rocks, and alge too small to hide me, but too deep to push off of to get a good escape -- and my mind raced to swimming back to shore, my fins carefully not breaking water, not splashing too much, to not attract attention to myself and how I would crawl up on the grey pebbley beach and my parents would finally pay attention to me because I'd have a big, lacerated bite in my leg, and I would have swam in bravely anyway, and would be laying on the beach bleeding all manly-like, rationally, glad that the sting of the salt-water was cauterizing and disinfecting my wound for me, and I would wave off help and walk to my towel & lay down in the soft, warm sand with my leg hanging over the edge of the terrycloth, bleeding into the sand, and I would be getting better already, and I respected the shark and knew it wasn't evil really, just doing its thing, as per nature. And the more I thought about it, I would love the shark, for its primordial nature and how it touched me, and made me a man.