Remembering and Forgetting

The Essence of all Things is quite funny, remarkable, and also quite persistent.

We often think that our memories are gone, dissipated into that far-off land of Nowhere where we send our burdens, our fears, and the constant reminders of who we are and the life we are living. We think that if we dig the hole ourselves with our gloves on and all the while even appreciating the freshness of the soil and the moist air during this wake that we can lay these Things softly to sleep; to rest forever in the ethers of What Can’t Touch Us. But.

            Do we get to decide when energy is recycled? Do we get to decide what these grueling and relentless and jagged emotions transform into once they are suffocated in our darkness? Are they not simply planted right back into our wombs to be born again in different forms, in different situations, in the many different facial expressions of the Human Beings sauntering in and out of our peripheral vision? Is the soil in the dustiest, dampest, most neglected gardens of our minds not fertile enough to break open with Life when the sunlight invites it to?

 

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            It’s possible that I was once a tiny child with a mother and a father and perhaps some dogs lying out in the snow, a fence and some train tracks painted into the backgrounds of their separate worlds.

            It’s possible that a connection that was supposed to be as strong and resilient as the arteries in our hearts and the inexplicable way we all feel the words sulking or swaying or racing through each other’s minds, was broken. The electricity had fallen from the power lines and the God and the Goddess turned their heads, leaving confused but ignorantly blissful young Things in their wakes.

            It’s possible that there existed a lot of Somethings that couldn’t be explained:

A hunger. Some quivering. Some golden fiber or bone or tendon that all humans were blessed with but not me. Maybe these Somethings wove themselves into the skin I wear and disguised themselves as Me. I paraded them and showed them off and tried to prove them; tried with every pulse of energy in every day of my life to prove to the world that this is Me, and I’m alive, and here I am.

There is a Something that masquerades itself as strength, solidity, wholeness. It can be so convincing for so many years that it becomes the topsoil of truth hovering over millions of miles of fertile depths, populated with seeds cracking in their shells with the anticipation of rebirth from this era of forgetfulness. These Somethings brainwash us, with our desperate permission and our urgent tenacity.

“It’s dead! It’s buried! It cannot touch me!” evolves to, “Did anything even happen?

Was I 3? 4?

Did I live those years, those lives? Was it real?”  and so on until the vastness of the self-imposed unknown tramples everything that could be worth remembering, or at the very least a second glance. These questions get rolled down powdering hills and gain efficacy through moments of heavy stacking; one layer upon the next until there is no gap between seconds because they are overflowing with material disguising itself as What Really Matters. Bloated moments stealing the comfort of my perfect body from this perfect space.  All for the sake of forgetting, covering up, blotting out.

What Really Matters becomes seeing and feeling the bones of my being through the vulnerable skin that touches the world. Maybe having someone call me Darling or feeling so empty at night that there couldn’t possibly be anything hidden underneath my demeanor because there is no essence left to this person. Having every hint of an element that could possibly make up my real or figurative guts dispelled into those utopian ethers of Nowhere is a desire only made so by the potency of the Forgotten Things…But.

Even zero is an element of the empty set. Even Nowhere is an element of Somewhere, Here, Now. Even neglected gardens bear the fruit of weeds. Even through the condensed layers of Every Day there is a soft spot that leaks and bleeds the ugliness that is only disfigured by misunderstanding.

 

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It’s funny that the Wholeness sees the wall behind it in the mirror, the sky above it from the free-flowing pools at its fingertips. It’s also funny that a semi-grown woman can regard herself as a child until I remember that I was one once, maybe for a few hours or days or years, but the simulacrum trapped itself in the moldings of my sculpture, which was weathered away by my shaking hands.

These shaking hands pressed up against rain-soaked windows forget that they need not try to grasp through the solidity of What Has Been, whether it has been recovered or still lies dormant, resting peacefully under my toes. Those individual raindrops on the other side of transparency reverberate something vital, unbelievable: nothing was lost. Even amidst all of the moments of my conscious efforts to forget, there was a source wiser than I, gracefully swinging its butterfly net and catching that which I didn’t understand at the time.

The decomposed nutrients of 17 years, 17 neglected children, 17 resonant stories, ignited the Spirit in the soles of my feet. I now find myself meandering on top of the Nowhere, filled to the brim with the collective chapters of my life I previously labeled as unworthy, or maybe just terrifyingly and exhaustingly heavy. I decided in the naïve mind of those early years that even if I did have a mother and a father and some dogs out back once, I could entomb those Things in Nothingness because the product of those Things multiplied was another Thing, expressing itself in the form of feelings and maybe a personality, maybe two or three, that I wasn’t yet ready to acknowledge. I forgot that the butterfly net was open-ended, and the recollections fluttering within them were free to bless the eyes of others until my own were brave enough to see.

I have begun to pick up the pieces and sew together the quilt of my life, a design that is beginning to make sense, consecrated with the persistent Things Remembered. The mirror is no longer empty, the reflection no longer distorted by empty spaces. And perhaps the funniest Thing of all is the uselessness of the image I pursued through the remembering and the forgetting.

I do not need to see my beauty in the glass. I do not need to see the evidence of my Place in the World. I do not need to see the project of myself completed on an easel before me. My wholeness is blatantly scattered throughout these pages, and I figure any second not spent reveling in my hallowed plentitude, composed of the light and the arduous, the remembered and the forgotten, is a second wasted. It is not yet time to move, only to see my strands flickering in the warmth on the trees, recycling themselves from one moment of magic into the next.