A Surreal and Dark World

My Early Memories

I remember my childhood as being normal, to a point. My parents divorced when I was two years old. I would visit my dad once a month on a weekend.
I grew up in Wisconsin. I pretty much lived with my mom and two brothers. I remember the house I grew up in. It was my world at the time. The house was level and even in the front and sloped downhill as it transitioned from the front yard to the backyard.

The backyard was on a downhill slope. About 2/3 of the way down was a rectangular garden. Then downhill about another 20 feet or so was "The Ditch" as we called it. It was actually just a waterway that took excess water from the streets and drained the water safely away to an area away from our house. I am guessing it finally pooled in some collection area. I am not really sure because I was too scared to venture that far away from my house. From the ditch at the bottom of the hill was an incline into our neighbors yard on the opposite side of the ditch, with the opposite configuration of our backyard.
I am not very good at time frames but I am thinking I was about 5 or six years old around this time.
In the fall my mom and I would pick strawberries, blueberries, pea pods, and other vegetables from the rectangular garden.

I enjoyed picking them from the ground, it was kind of relaxing and methodical for me. I would pull some of them out by the roots, I enjoyed the feeling of the excess dirt between my fingers.

Then there were the worms, which I always found fascinating because they had no eyes. I always wondered if they ever knew where they were going.

When we were done filling the baskets with different varieties of fruits and vegetables we would bring them back into the house where my mom made meals out of them.

Our house was bi-level. You could walk in the front door or go through the garage. The garage led to the kitchen and the front door led to a family room. To the left there was a hallway which led to the bedrooms or straight ahead from the front door was an archway that led to the kitchen and then to windows which looked west into the backyard. There was a TV tower about a mile away and when it rained, all you could see was the faint flashing red light at the very top.
Just to the left of the archway was the door to the basement. I hated the basement. The stairs went straight down and then there was a wall, you couldn't see to the right or left of the bottom of the stairs. My younger brother and I used to think it was funny to trick the other to go down the stairs, then turn off the light and shut the door. But the main reason I hated the basement was when I had to do laundry. We had the old puke green washer and dryer. And when the load of clothes was unbalanced during the spin cycle, which they almost always were, the washing machine would jump around like it was alive.

...On the other side of the basement was a little sitting area and tv. There was also a sliding glass door where you could walk straight out into the back yard. About 10 feet out from the sliding glass door was a rusty swingset and old metal jungle gym.

In the summer I remember sitting on the swingset for hours watching for storms. I loved the weather, I especially loved thunderstorms. I would wait for them to approach and eventually end up inside when the lightning got too close. I made sure I was always near a window so I could see the action.

And I almost always prayed for a tornado

I had a few neighborhood friends that I would play with from time to time and I had a bike which kept me busy exploring a lot of those summer days.....I thought I was a normal kid who did normal stuff like all the kids my age. Little did I know though that something was wrong with my brain, something that was not that well understood during those times. An evil that would get worse as I got older, a demon brewing inside my broken brain.