Lovely Bones
There will be a time when all of this has changed. When my memories are the only things that give life to this time, when the actual substance of houses, streets, existence will have crumbled and decayed. When this moment, this living, vibrating, expanded moment will be viewed through a long tunnel, will be encapsulated and contained in a black shadow, holding in the light. Then, it will be lighter now; there will be a glow, within and around me; the air will seem warmer and stuffier, suffocating yet pure. I'll remember writing these words, remember feeling this moment, and marking it to hold on to it. As if I could ever hold on to anything. But it doesn't stop me from trying, grasping at memories like handfuls of sand. Easter baking, in the kitchen with my mom. My grandmother's laugh, recorded in my memory from a memory after the fact, the real laugh lost somewhere in the ether. Nana and Pop Pop, the house and lawn I run around in so often in the back of my mind. I hold them all in the ballistics gel of memory, shooting them in, the material absorbing the force, and hoping they stay held in place. It's all preservation, self-preservation in a way, all these little pieces of me and my life. Because when I'm lying in a bed (if I'm lucky), or lying on the street, or falling to the ground and breathing my last breath, where will all of this be? Where will all of me be? My history will dissolve in an instant. And there are the connections I've made, the people who will remember me, remember knowing me, remember knowing what I remember knowing, but it's all copies of copies of impressions of impressions - my story, the one I see and feel, will be lost, inevitably. Aging is itself a little death, in that way. My stories will be lost over time, to myself. The emotions I once felt so strongly that I believed they'd perpetually loom as large as they did at the time always shrink, like a child's room revisited when she's older, the table she couldn't reach now at waist-level. Even the emotions surrounding this entry will dissipate, boiled off by time, the air gradient of new experience pushing the vapor away.
I mark this moment. This is when I held time in my hands, clutching at the present. I paint myself in sepia yellows, insert candle-light glow in my pitch-black bedroom. This is a moment of summer, even though it's still spring. This is a moment between lives, between past and future selves. I will look back on this moment and wish to inhabit it again, when I was young, before things got busy and crazy and serious and real, before time kept marching on. And I can't appreciate this now, without taking this full long view, because things aren't actually like that. Nothing is simple, nothing is easy, nothing is satisfying. But I know they are, or that they'll become that way once this has passed. I'll wish and hope and miss and grasp and long. And it'll be just as futile then as it is now. But I wrap my arms around this moment and hold it to me, suffuse myself with its light, and plant it firmly here, in the now. This is what is, for better or worse. I leave it here for me to come back to, safe, like a marker or ruin or holy site, to pause and reflect and enjoy.
I mark this moment. This is when I held time in my hands, clutching at the present. I paint myself in sepia yellows, insert candle-light glow in my pitch-black bedroom. This is a moment of summer, even though it's still spring. This is a moment between lives, between past and future selves. I will look back on this moment and wish to inhabit it again, when I was young, before things got busy and crazy and serious and real, before time kept marching on. And I can't appreciate this now, without taking this full long view, because things aren't actually like that. Nothing is simple, nothing is easy, nothing is satisfying. But I know they are, or that they'll become that way once this has passed. I'll wish and hope and miss and grasp and long. And it'll be just as futile then as it is now. But I wrap my arms around this moment and hold it to me, suffuse myself with its light, and plant it firmly here, in the now. This is what is, for better or worse. I leave it here for me to come back to, safe, like a marker or ruin or holy site, to pause and reflect and enjoy.