(no subject)
She told me what had happened last time we’d seen each other, things I vaguely recalled in different arrangements, and parts my memory had discarded entirely. It has been three years of massive and systematic memory destruction. I had visited her last just a month after the most desolate and traumatic two months of my life. I remember a fun time with a few minor east slides. In fact there were more difficult times than that. ‘Difficult’ in the sense of my totally erratic, unpredictable and risky behavior. A crazy girl, who had lost her inbuilt compass, streaming running frantic through the dark parks and alleys of The Big Unknown City. They chased me, she said. She said I was wild. But I don’t remember a thing about it.
But it was strange returning to a place and seeing it for the first time. As if I had never actually been back to the Northeast, because I remember nothing of it. She told me we’d gone here, eaten here, done that: but I remember none of it. Just snippets, tiny news footage reels, mere seconds and smells. She explained how much we've changed, she told me how she remembered us before. The word-image was of two boisterous vibrant clown girls listening to Spice Girls, going to our Chinese restaurant, spelling our names out in Lo Mein, turning the lights out and then darting out the front door only to prank call every porn hotline from the payphone on Grant Avenue only to run next door to WaWa as our safe house.
I guess for her it is easier to contrast since in the last 11 years she has seen me in short sprinting bursts in very different states each time, not as a continuous entity gradually melting and reforming the way those who have always been around in one physical sense or another have seen it. She has viewed the different manifestations in relative isolation. Nearly as much as I have I suppose, except she has retained a memory for the past.
But it was strange returning to a place and seeing it for the first time. As if I had never actually been back to the Northeast, because I remember nothing of it. She told me we’d gone here, eaten here, done that: but I remember none of it. Just snippets, tiny news footage reels, mere seconds and smells. She explained how much we've changed, she told me how she remembered us before. The word-image was of two boisterous vibrant clown girls listening to Spice Girls, going to our Chinese restaurant, spelling our names out in Lo Mein, turning the lights out and then darting out the front door only to prank call every porn hotline from the payphone on Grant Avenue only to run next door to WaWa as our safe house.
I guess for her it is easier to contrast since in the last 11 years she has seen me in short sprinting bursts in very different states each time, not as a continuous entity gradually melting and reforming the way those who have always been around in one physical sense or another have seen it. She has viewed the different manifestations in relative isolation. Nearly as much as I have I suppose, except she has retained a memory for the past.