Zen and the art of memory maintenance.

[why_blogger]

My face is cut by cold rushing wind on a dead still night. My head cocked forward, my eyes screwed, as I desperately peer into the onrushing dark. In boyhood I marveled at the airstreams we manufactured. My parents in the front, I alone in the back, my arm, an airplane, projected out the window. In the car we sailed down mysterious highways. Where I grew up there was a long and distant mountain range, a companion to any journey. Like the sun and the moon, it would stay fixed as we drove. The entire world stood still, and in this stillness it appeared that we too stayed fixed… only the air moved. The air stubbornly roared in the opposite direction of wherever we happened to be going, as if objecting, as if pushing us back. “Keep your hands in the car”, my mother would scold. She feared that unnatural wind.

All my attention unavoidably turned to ever coming dark. All my effort directed at seeing beyond the pale beam of my single headlight. Is it any wonder that the path taken - having receded to darkness - is forgotten? I can only merely glimpse life as it passes, oblivious to its true significance until far too late. The signposts are inadequate and easily missed. Receding into the past, my moments slip away. So much is forgotten. The faces of my parents for instance. So much living, so much struggling, and I’m left only with scraps. It’s like trying to hold water, in the end you are just left damp.

I drive to a cemetery; there between the trees and the dead I am meeting a stranger.