This desk stood in my primary childhood bedroom, that is the one I lived in from ages 7 to 13. I’m not sure where it was before then, but it ended up in the garage of the house we moved into the summer I turned 14, where it has since resided, against the eastern wall on top of the concrete floor that becomes the driveway and then the side and the street and then everything else that is the world beyond my parents’ house.
After the third bocce trip and what developed from the trip, what I began to refer to—only to myself at this point—as the condition, I found myself once again at my parents’ house, just as I had after I spent all of my money traveling the fall after high school and again the spring after high school and the summer after my first year of college, summers and springs after college, the summer before when I quit my jobs and moved out of my house, preparing to spend all of my money on a big trip, and now, 7 months later, after spending all of my money on that trip. I tidied up the desk at which I wrote my first stories and crafted my first projects—creating quills from hawk feathers found in the neighborhood that I would dip in ink wells, making Christmas cards, etc.—decades before, the polished wood setting, a desk that I could once have fit into and hidden beneath a roll-top shell if the appropriate situation ever arose, like a turtle in, what was explained to us children, its traveling home.
That is, in a sense, what it is to work at this desk, in this desk, from this desk, hunching ever forward into a space I push further into its recesses, adding to and subtracting from its varied drawers, collecting nicknacks and old scotch tape dispensers in the petite éta·gères and credenzas of the corners. This desk has always housed my writerly fantasies and I have now returned to it, it contains this laptop and more and more as I come to sit in front of it, my fingers and the words that create are drawn into its vacuum.
When my father outgrew his typewriter, with the rest of the professional world in the early ‘90s, I took it and placed it in this desk. I typed for the sake of typing, marveling at the instantaneous incarnation of the letters on the page, darker, bolder and faster than the grey and primitive ribbon ink that came from the Macintosh Classic via the printer when we weren’t playing a greenish pixilated ball and paddle brick-busting game. My father had the other desk in his office downstairs, the other roll-top desk next to me now, where I learned key commands and everything about the world of macintosh, where as a 9 year old I told my 40-something aunt it was a shortcut to drag the icon of her disk into the trash to eject it. But it wasn’t worth it to her to trust me. The contents of that floppy disk were too important to willy-nilly place it in the trash no matter how hypothetical that action may have been.
I see me and my father at these parallel desks, somewhere unfixed in time like some surreal film, slowly being consumed by the desks, increasingly slumped over, our feet leaving the ground, moving paramecium-like, the roll-top slowly descending and engulfing us, as though we could replace this reality with that of books, trade these uncertainties for those of the fixed word, on the pages of the books closed and shelved though still easily accessible, the documents on floppy disks somewhere in the house if not lost in the move long ago, long after the technology was already irrelevant.
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