I was raised in a trailer tucked deep in the woods of the DeSoto National Forest because my parents couldn’t afford the rent at a trailer park for the first decade of my life. Most of my early memories don’t make sense to normal people and I find it hard to separate what counts as unique experiences and what counts as broken neurology. Sometimes, it’s easy to say that such-and-such behavior is stereotypical autism or ADHD or whatever the mental illness desure is, then I remember that I lived too far from our nearest neighbor to build normal relationships outside of the regimented and archaic South Mississippi school system. There’s something neurological, for sure; I just don’t know what counts fully as growing up how I did and what’s normal for any kid.

As an example, to this day, I feel a sense of low-speed solitude when I think back to myself staring at the sky from the back seat of an old Corsica parked in the grass. I don’t know why I was there, but something had led my mom to leave me to sit in the car while she walked herself into the thin-walled trailer. I stared at the tops of the pine trees as the clouds passed by and watched the trail of a jet cut a straight line across the sky for what must have been thirty minutes.

When she finally called me in, I didn’t want to leave the car. There was no difference between being out here in the car with no TV, AC, or toys and being inside of the house with a broken TV, a broken AC, and a couple decade-old toys I’d lost interest in. My focus faded as the clouds lost their already tenuous form and the tops of the pines swayed with the gentle wind of what must have been a spring or summer day. My eyes, unfocused as they were, locked in on a spot I couldn’t look away from as I went into something akin to flow state.