The Bedside Table: A Micro Memoir

         It was just a nightstand, but it stirred something deep within me, and I just couldn’t place what it was at first. Not just a four-legged table, but this one had a second half-top that formed a nook. And in that nook, I could remember a huge glass ashtray brimming with change. That table had been in my uncle’s room when I was a child. At first, that was the only thing I could remember clearly.
         A few days before, my aunt (his sister) had given me that table to help furnish a new home. And daily, it loomed bigger and bigger, following me it seemed like, until it was all I could think of. Throughout every act in my day, my eyes found their way to it.
          I think it was the third evening that table was in my possession that I laid in bed looking at it through the open door when suddenly fireworks went off in my head.
         Flashes of memories of shame and tears and lies of “that being what love was” raced in my head. I suddenly understood why I had so little childhood memories, why I had forgotten so much of myself.