Geometric Allegory

1.

As a kid, I got lost in all things imagination. In fact, I still do. Whether that’s a gift or a curse, I’ll leave you to decide, but it’s the hallmark of my character: a close connection to my interior world shaped by mood and tone, colored and textured.

I grew up in a small town called Pleasanton, snug in the shadow of California’s Devil’s Mountain—Mount Diablo. In the 1970s, Pleasanton was a modest place, more town than city, and, as my mother put it, a place where people settled when they couldn’t afford more expensive cities like Fremont and San Jose.

Everything felt connected back then, all our lives tangled into one tight ball of yarn. We kids all went to the same school, the same dentist. We knew each other from soccer teams and Boy Scout troops; some of us attended the same church. We started kindergarten as an eager cohort and carried each other forward, mostly remaining in tact, all the way to high school graduation.

Looking back, there’s much to be grateful about regarding my childhood, but memory is a strange companion. It arrives suddenly, unbidden—one moment storming through the door with astonishing power, then slipping away before it can fully be named.

Certain memories surface. Even now, I see my childhood home, the house itself and the surrounding fields and the creek directly behind it. For eight years we lived there, and much of who I structurally am today traces directly back to the foundations of my past. I remember my obsession with fire and wooden matches (and all things burning); I remember the sweaty inside of a latex mask and mixed bags of Halloween candy. The distinct pulse of open air carried in it distinct seasons, and, somewhere among it all, the constant hum of water.

I took a keen interest in being outdoors. It was my refuge—my playground, my school, my church. Vast fields spanned for miles with a creek serving as a threshold between the outstretched horizon and my family’s house.

I felt especially connected to the creek, and like an explorer, I walked its length and mapped out every inch of it. There, I learned to preserve myself through archetypal concepts that live in us all. While other kids played with their Star Wars figurines and their Lincoln Logs, I ventured out by myself. I’d scramble deep into the creek and sometimes play at the water’s edge. Sometimes I would stare into it, into the reeds and the overgrown brush. I watched, transfixed, as rivulets of water carved their pathway through the muddy banks, and I imagined myself as a type of adventurer bravely navigating the deeper currents on my invisible raft. This was my Land of the Lost, and I was a white-water warrior steering into new realms.

Everything felt expressive and cinematic in those days…

If AI were ever to generate a movie based on my life from the, it would start with the following scene and serve as the visuals for the opening credits.

[Instructions for AI: Okay, let’s work on the beginning of our movie. Don’t worry about getting it 100% “right”; we can view and it and decide together what to keep and what to get rid of. I’m seeing this in my head: it starts with a wide-angle lens (I think?) and we’re looking at a vast and overgrown field that takes up the bottom third of the screen and a bright blue sky—no clouds—with a mountain some 20 miles in the distance is at the top. (Note: this is not a lawn or well manicured park type of field. It’s made up of tall green grasses.) Once you’ve shown the title of the movie, begin a movement forward giving the effect that you’re gliding perhaps a foot above the grasses, the movement being smooth and weightless. Meanwhile, the opening credits appear on screen. Once finished the camera should deliberately pan up and bring into focus the immovable presence of Mount Diablo (which is some 20 miles away). Let me know if you need me to clarify any of this. Thanks!]

I was an 8 year old boy, and I searched. Always. I searched the overgrown horizon and scanned for jackrabbits, or I searched the creek for tadpoles to collect in one of my mother’s canning jars. I forged paths through waist-high weeds.

The camera glides forward, following an unseen path through the undergrowth, its motion deliberate, steady. The camera’s movement jolts to a halt—just for a moment—as the weeds part, revealing a flash of scaled skin: an errant snake coiled in tension. The shot lingers for a moment, them the weeds close in behind.

The creek thrilled me—it carried not only the pulse of adventure, but also a whisper of mystery, which at times felt both alluring and somehow dangerous. Not truly dangerous, of course; the worst threat was falling from a tree and breaking an arm. But something about the creek hinted at different threats, a primal sensation that would freeze me in place or send me dashing in the opposite direction. 

I believe, at such a young age, my limited vocabulary allowed me to experience the world differently than I do now. Back then, I lived beyond the grasp of defined language, its “specified” words and precise definitions. I experienced life as something raw and unshaped—a timeless essence unhinged from the spine of time. Even now, those childhood years continue to inform me and reach out and I to me. I that place at age seven or eight just on the edge of language’s reach. There, I explored ineffable moments of expression—moments untouched and unfiltered, and I feel them now. This is the presence that bears witness to the glory and the terror of experience.

In those years before years, my interior monologue—that voice in my head—hadn’t yet grown into the divisive force it would later become. It hadn’t learned to name and number, to classify and contain. Later, this “inner voice” would be colonized by an army of words, each carrying its own biases, each imposing borders on what had once been boundless. A linguistic prism would take shape and a system of “mutually agreed upon” meanings would leave little room to expand. They would teach me descriptive words to help me express my truth more easily, but instead these words stabbed into immortality and reduced the infinite into something pinned, mounted, and clearly named.

The voice I describe is the one that now ushers us through the seasons, reducing myriad forms of snow into a single word. This is the voice that flattens what was once boundless, rendering it into basic parts of speech.

2.

By far the most mysterious place in the fields behind my house was at the creek’s eastern edge, where a concrete retaining wall rose all the way from the water up to the edge.  A drainage hole, probably four feet tall gaped at its center. In the dry summer months when the water receded, I often dared myself to approach it.  

A deep voice would often seem to say, “Come to me. Crouch down inside… See where I lead and what I know.”

I would stand at the tunnel, its air cool and still, and I would gaze into its dark chaos and deep into its expanse, always compelled to throw rocks, to shout into it and allow myself to be lost in its measureless echoes. My voice would bounce back—now carrying an unnerving emptiness. It seemed to stretch for miles.

Once, while standing frozen in somber contemplation, I peered deeper down the tunnel, just beyond the last place the light touched from the outside rays, and I saw red. It was perhaps the size of a brick, though brighter and far more slick.  Its lower half submerged into several inches of water.

What was it, and why did I feel so sickened?

I froze.

What was the thing that moved?  It was alive, lingering just inside the concrete walls tight there where the darkness meets the light.

From within the tunnel, the camera captures every detail of the water’s surface, every swirl of silt spiraling around it. In the distance, a boy sharpens from the background. He is circled by the light from outside. The camera moves forward, over the red object and all the way to the boy whose face is framed by the curved wall.

I felt the cool air and I squinted trying to make out what it was, all the while my heart pounded in my ears. I steadied myself on the threshold of darkness and waded into the moment.

“Crouch down inside,” the imagined voice said (and it had the voice of Mr. Broody, the neighbor down the street. He’d lost his leg in the Vietnam War.  I visited him once and watched as he attached his artificial leg just below his left knee.)

The reflection of the light shifted the .

I saw the object move—slowly, deliberately. What was this abominable thing? Was it retreating further into the shadows, or was it coming out into the light?

Determined to find out, I drew in a deep breath and leaned into the tunnel, the front part of my body now completely inside its curved walls. My shoes squished into the soft mud where I’d walker.

There it was—a lobster, an actual red lobster, and my mind sort of flipped into overdrive. I couldn’t process what I’d seen. It was impossible. An overwhelming dizziness hit me, a disorientation of sorts.  I didn’t try to get the lobster as I had done with so many frogs and snakes. I didn’t want to make it a trophy. Besides being too far inside the tunnel and too close to the unspeakable darkness, it seemed…. Later, my mother would explain that I’d seen a crawdad, yet when I finally saw a picture of one, I knew she was wrong.

That moment is just one of many I’ve catalogued. There are so many more.  So many hiding places.

Beyond the creek was a sports park, and past that lay those wild open fields—another part of my real playground. The manicured lawns of the park had no use for me. Leave those to the athletes. But the overgrown fields and winding creek? They were my moors, and I, some forgotten Brontë brother. Over it all loomed Mount Diablo, a purple smudge on the horizon, etched like a tattoo on the sky. I can still see its shape. Just last weekend, when Carlos and I drove out to Pleasanton, I pointed it out to him and told him what a fixture it was to me. He took a courtesy glance, and we continued on our way.

As a child, I didn’t know “Diablo” meant devil. I found out later. If I had known, it would have both delighted and terrified me.  The thrill of that knowledge, carried in the weight of the mountain’s shadow, might have kept me awake terrified at night—but oh, what afternoons I would’ve spent running in its grasp. Was its name an accident? I doubt it. Perhaps Diablo was always following me, as old as the mountain itself.

3.

A new scene: the archeologist-midwife appears with herbs and potions, smoke curling from sweet incense that burns somewhere in a dimly lit tomb. I am there, kneeling, an amulet on my neck. She is drawing something out of me—her forceps slick and careful, pulling life from my core.

I stand arched over bricks, clutching and gripping. The midwife pulls again, and this time, I feel it: a shift, a vibration, a breaking loose. Something emerges—a seed pulled from its fibrous shell, dislodging from a funnel-like well, dark as the beginning of light. A fullness settles into silence.

She is born.

A word, slick and waxy, brought into the world as if summoned. I am lying flat on a gurney now, staring into a bright light above me. Shadows hover, figures blurred at the edges. The midwife leans close and folds this word into my chest. I feel its weight. Its breath becomes mine, synced, deliberate, as though our rhythms have been bound by blood. The umbilical cord between us throbs like a thick vine, pulsing with life. But when the midwife cuts the cord, the word becomes its own.

“It” is a “she,” and she is no longer wholly mine. A spoken thought, a tulpa made separate.

The spell breaks here. The wave recedes. I am back in a hospital room, shuttled through swinging doors and fluorescent light. The edges of the moment splinter and dissolve.

——-