Cycles

At one time in your life, when you lived with your parents and older sister in a modest, middle class four-plex at 6145 1/2 Orange Street in the mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles, your bed time was proclaimed to be 8:30, a time you believed was much too early.

In consequence, you ;lay awake for some time, which in retrospect likely means at the most half an hour. During this time, you were aware of the conversation from down the long hallway separating the bedroom where you then fussed and fumed about the unfairness of things, listening to the conversation between your father, sister, and mother.

They always seemed to you to be saving the most delicious moments for those times where you were not in their midst. This caused you to vow a new word to you, revenge, although you were never quite sure how you would extract your imagined due.

Over the years, one by one, they were taken from you, your father first, then your mother, ultimately your sister. You have neither hope nor imagination of afterlife; dead is dead, gone, finished. 

Neverless, on occasion your dreams carry you back into the past in which you were resentful of being away, down that long hallway, separated from the conversation, the laughter, the occasional pauses, then the laughter again.

What once seemed an indignity, and in fact, it was. Now is another matter when you lapse into sleep with the memories of those silences punctuated by conversation and bursts of laughter.