Someone told me once that you leave a part of yourself everywhere you’ve been, particularly in those places that have touched your soul. This leads me to wonder how many fragmented shards of me there are wandering this city. If I should meet myself, walking along the riverbank, shirtless, would I know myself? Assuming I remember that particular fragment, perhaps.
But what of all the times I have, by now, time and again, forgotten? What is it that causes us to remember some things, some times, while others are lost forever?
The little boxcar house that’s now burnt to the ground – someday will they film ghostie programs there, and wonder who it is laughing in the middle of the night? Will they ask that shard who it is? Will that memory of me-who-was bang on the wall, once-for-no or twice-for-yes? The two-storey white and green house with the strange little room at the back; do the people there smell things burning on the stove that have no right to be burning? Hashish and cigarette smoke?
This has been a time of remembering, these last few weeks, and it gives me pause to wonder: what is it like to grow older? Do you ever lose the sense of who you *are* as who you *were*? Does it continue changing?
Honestly, I am tired of this moving forward, always moving forward. I am tired of this forward motion. Do you, like I do, wish that there would be a grand suspension of everything? A cosmic hiccough that will give us time to catch our breath? I am always concerned with the future being a time of loss, a time when all there is is for me to remember things that were. How, then, I ask, do I begin to look forward with joy? How do I cast my senses forward and not see a time when there are kisses and snuggles from little children, instead taking joy in the knowledge that they, too, will someday have little ones of their own, to run laughing through the mud-filled yard, into my open, waiting arms? How does that happen?
i make squee noises when you tell me stuff.