Can't See The Memory For The Trees

Peter was telling us that it was time to gather close friends and family.
I went into the den of my father, thinking of my nights standing there, looking across the street during our conversations and escapades.
Why not look at one another while we spoke on the phone? We had the luxury.
I went to the window then, to look at where she once stood, and to seem dramatic.
But Dad's trees were 15 years older, and I couldn't see past them.
I realized then that there was no going back to that time.
We'd all been adults for too long.
I sank.
A minute or a day later, Peter called to tell me.


*Geoffrey Hartman, in his paper On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies mentions two contradictory elements of trauma knowledge, and this post, when it was written, was an example of the first of those, I think. On the contradiction, Hartman mentions how traumatic knowledge of a horrible event is "registered rather than experienced. It seems to have bypassed perception and consciousness, and falls directly into the psyche."
The other form of trauma knowledge, according to Hartman, "is a kind of memory of the event, in the form of a perpetual troping of it by the bypassed or severley split psyche" (page 537).

*Peter was Sarah's husband. We met at the age of eight when he happened upon me rolling my red wagon along Finn Street, mere meters from the house she would come to live in.
They only got married cause they met, and they only met cause of me. And y'know, I never pointed that out nearly as often as I would have expected myself to.
Though I couldn't share the bond they'd eventually form (there wasn't enough room in the bed), they let me in on little big things, like telling me that Sarah was knocked up before anyone else. We were rolling in their Mazda 3 at the time; two surrogate parents telling their adoptive 29-year old that he was about to get a new brother or sister.
Did I mention there were kids?
Oh, there were kids alright.