By Ryan Phelan
Spring 2019 Kaplan Award Winner
It was a scorcher as weathermen like to say. The kind of day that you really want your windows wide open. A little hot for the late spring isn’t it? Not unbearable, but strikingly warm for my untanned Seattle skin.
I lived (and still live) in a fraternity. A place where young men get smart and act dumb. A place where amplified autonomy is met with diminished responsibility. We act like James Bond with a license to spill. It’s a place where you find pride in things you shouldn’t be proud of. Embrace it.
My unconventional home served as a setting for my moments most profound and most illegal. Three stories of brick carrying thousands of stories of misremembered debauchery and sincerity. The names may have been changed to protect the guilty, and recalling this moment of anxious insight relies on my memory’s weakness.
* * *
Smoke.
Smoke is all I could smell. It flooded into the house in the early afternoon through those damn open windows. Now my room smelled like ash. I sensed the likely culprit to be the firepit that rested on our lawn a short distance from my window. We built it a year earlier because sometimes young men just need something to do.
I looked out my window and my suspicions were confirmed. I figured that I simply missed the memo about an oddly timed midweek afternoon barbeque.
When I peered out, my eyes met the form of an unfamiliar figure. His skin was pale and aged, visibly more by stress than by years. He sat on one of the wide grey bricks that encircle the pit. His legs were clasped tightly but a worn brown messenger bag rested suspiciously open at his feet. Looking around 30 years old, he was too old to be a brother in the bonds.
A stranger. Next to him, the firepit was lit with sizable flames over a modest pile of wood. He was sitting next to a stack of papers. He lifted one over the flames before dropping it to its end.
As disconcerting as it was to see a stranger on your lawn, his peculiarity of using the firepit was all the more confusing I assure you.
I ventured to the room next store in search of answers.
“Hey do any of you guys know why some dude is burning shit in our firepit?”
The question provoked a slight confusion from the brothers, but no answer. Unsatisfied, I wandered down the stairs to the living room where our President Carson was sitting with several others. I asked the same question.
“He said he lived next door and asked if he could use it to burn some documents,” he answered dismissively.
If you are asking yourself at this moment why anyone would agree to such a request without probing for additional information, you can rest assured that I also was perplexed by the matter-a-fact reply I received. But running a fraternity is funny business.
“And you said yes?”
“I couldn’t really think of a reason not to. I don’t really see the harm,” he replied, surprised I was asking so many questions. Sometimes in a fraternity, it’s best if you don’t ask questions.
The interaction again left me unsatisfied—but also curious. What kind of documents are so important that you are willing to go to the house next door and ask to burn them? What act of crime or espionage were we aiding and abetting?
No answers.
I ventured back to my room and closed up the windows. By the time I returned, his stack of papers had shrunk considerably. I was confident that his time on our property would soon come to a close. Yet I continued to watch from my window. The stack dwindled quickly—but a smaller item at the bottom of it captured my attention.
It was a photograph. Small. In my mind, I imagined it as a photo of a deceitful ex-lover or a long deceased relative. But in truth, I have no idea what it was a picture of. Still, it rested in this man’s stack of “to be disposed of” items.
In a moment of either tremendous bravery, deep-seated bitterness, or pure whimsy, he gazed at the photo briefly before tossing it into the flames.
Smoke rose, indiscriminately lifting to the wide sky whatever memories rested in that image.
This was the same firepit that blazed as my friend Connor jumped over it three times while our previous president (and de facto risk manager) chased him in violent pursuit. It’s the pit that served as a landing zone for a dresser that some freshmen chucked from two floors above as a means of efficiently deploying firewood. The fire we burned that night rose four feet too high for anyone’s comfort.
This spot that had served as the fulcrum of some of my most salient experiences living with these crazy young men now served to destroy a photographic moment captured in this mysterious stranger’s life.
* * *
I now wonder if one day all of my memories will be distilled into photographs. The kind of paralyzing thought that I can’t trace through time. I hope at that point that they aren’t lost eternally to flames. Once something becomes smoke you can’t grasp it. It sticks in your throat but not in your hands—and certainly not in your heart.
As this fear of scorched moments and memories settled in my mind, thoughts of my grandmother quickly followed. They continue to chase me.
When I was a child her faded British accent surrounded me like a comforting blanket. During the summers I spent every day at her house while my mom was at work. My grandmother’s calm forgiving nature exuded a love that felt protective.
We read every word of Harry Potter together. She cherished handwritten letters above all else. She survived The Blitz in London’s underground stations, and she cared deeply about the exploits of the Queen.
By the time I was in high school, Alzheimer’s had ravaged her mind and her body was soon to come. I heard she died from a phone call in the library during my first quarter of college.
Her death was expected, but my numbness still frightens me. A piece of me was suffocated the first time she didn’t remember my name. I thought I would scream into my hands that night but I swallowed it back down. I caged it up and hoped that if I locked it away for long enough it would die out.
A fear still exists in my mind that I will one day watch my memories die. That the smoke will wrap around my throat briefly before it dissipates into formless air.
Through the unknowable motions of a nameless stranger’s bonfire, I confront this existential dread. If my memories are only left in photographs, I don’t ever plan to take them to the flames.