Ostensibly, he was bent toward that which he must have still imagined as the presence of the dog, and for his part would not have known any other reason for his squatted and sedentary posture, if any at all, than for its sake. More saliently, however, this positioning of himself in such a way was, in part, because of a deep melancholy over all those who were gone from his life and regret for all the experiences that they had given him--experiences that had accumulated and embedded carvings onto the walls of his brain until there were reliefs of inexpugnable, defunct memories, aggravating the past so that it was alive in him still. Most of all, he was in this posture because subconsciously he was still bent over the rubble of childhood, expecting the pieces to reassemble themselves. If there were gentle and sublime moments in the distant past, tiny shards of some shiny splendor in the rubble, to him it would almost seem impossible that they would not be eventually restored somehow. And to him any fragment of that which was love, that mutual delight in being in the presence of those whom one was familiar with, had to be salvaged but not knowing how this was to be done, he conceptualized the shards as having the innate power to reassemble themselves, as if those rare occurrences of some degree of familial harmony had power to resurrect and reshape anew a distant, unhappy past that had ended decades ago. Despite knowing that everything moved ineluctably forward with its tattered past being dragged behind, it was only natural to have moments of being mesmerized by those shards and fixated with fixing the unfixable.
For at this moment he was remembering, all so dimly, a time of awful sweetness in the bitter, a darkness tinged opaquely in light. It was a dinner in which he had been so nervous among his family and their sadistic barraging of him, the youngest, with disparagement that he had dropped a plate of food in the kitchen, had found himself threatened with a belt, since fumbling a plate like fumbling a ball would, to the pleasure of all the rival team, exact a penalty, had seen Kazem, the molester, impede their father from swinging his belt, and then had witnessed Kazem's custodial role of cleaning up the mess at the game's closure. No, there had not been any closures for, back then, it had been one game stretched out over the years with pauses in the action each night in the respite of sleep that was sometimes interrupted by a different game entirely. Had there been nothing but pain from this former family, it might have been easier for him to move forward with his own life than it was. His life would have been that of defying the members with every impulse. However, in doing so he would have found himself merely an irate puppet moving against the pull of the strings instead of conducting actions in support of the rational principles of man himself.