In 2019, I wrote here that, “When I was a 4-year-old, I sat on the fire escape of our apartment and thought: ‘What if there were nothing?’ (But I’m sure, back then, I didn’t use the subjunctive.) And then thought: ‘I’m here.’ I stared into the slate-gray sky and knew or sensed that ‘nothing’ is the one thing that cannot be.”
It was that slate-gray sky, of course. I don’t suppose I’ve ever seen anything else that so suggested emptiness, nothingness. I don’t remember which of my parents was home at the time. Likely it was my mother, and perhaps she had shooed me from the kitchen so she could begin dinner preparations, and I may have been feeling lonely. That was my normal state, and it would not change until we moved from the city to the suburbs, and home became a ranch-style house in a newly built neighborhood in what had once been a park or, as we kids called what little greenery remained, the woods.
Once I was old enough for school, my loneliness evaporated, which was not entirely a good thing, because all I wanted to do was play (there were always playmates), and that was
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