Sleeping Lessons
"Once we were one person and always it will be a little that way."
~ F. Scott Fitzgerald to Zelda
First off, this is not a real update, just an excerpt of something that I have written in my actual pen and paper journal. Amanda (digame ) was showing me a book on her Amazon wish list yesterday which was a book of love letters between F. Scott Fitzgerald and his crazy wife, Zelda. Anyway, in one of the reviews, the above quote appeared and I thought it fit rather well with what I had written a few weeks or so ago.
Sleeping Lessons
She longed to feel a sweeping adoration for someone again. To not be able to imagine life without someone else's presence. To moon over the mere existence of the seemingly perfect creature that she cast her love upon. She found that she was so realistic now that she feared the possibility that perhaps her clear idealistic days were over--and without so much as a warning bell! It came upon her so quickly that she could not reach out to cling on to the last idea of her hopes.
Would she recall a year from now how her then husband's skin had felt upon her own? Would a day come when she could no longer picture the olive green of his arm against the powder blue of her own? She lost control in the fear that her memories might someday betray her. And this fear of lost memories clamored about her heart and mind, inaudible to those surrounding but turbulent and violent within. This fear caused her to obsessively categorize each moment. She cried not at the loss of love for him but at the loss of another small memory, another piece of the puzzle gone missing.
She should have written them down!
A mind is more deceptive than a heart, or is it the other way around?
At times, mid-sentence she would get that feeling--a slight sinking of her heart--as as one of these misplaced memories returned with a stinging behind her eyes, a swelling shut of the throat. The memory of being encircled in her sleep, his legs and arms draped about her body. The remembrance of how, upon waking, she would nestle in even closer, sharing skin, steadying her breathing to match his own. It was only then, in the clutches of this memory of a moment that seemed so insignificant at the time, that she thanked God for the lost moments. She was intensely grateful that every time she had told herself in a moment, "Ah, I will never forget this for as long as I live!" she always forgot those moments first.
A fuzzy mind is a blessing. Everything looks unassuming under dim lights and covered in a thin glaze of dust. It is when your mind recalls the jingle of your laughter mashed together with his, the way his voice sounded in your ear when he said the words you still keep only for yourself, that is the tragedy. The tragedy is in the perfect remembrance of an unsoiled moment in the midst of a disgraceful larger picture.
These tiny, irregular memories assaulted her in reverse.
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Anyway, that's all that I wrote and after reading it back it seems pretty self-indulgent and fluffy.
Hope you're all doing well. Have a wonderful afternoon!