Memories are beautiful things. I used to think that they’re rigid, and set in stone. In my experience so far,that has not been the case. I have lost a lot of people that I’ve loved dearly. As I recall my memories,from my private literature,when I’m in a slumber of suffering, I recall them with grace and love, laced with desperation. Each time, I remember my loved ones a little more, with a little or a lot of love, my memory of them alters slightly. Each time I look through the guillotine of nostalgia,I look at a different version of my memory, and over time, the original memory is slowly chipped away, replaced with my morphed recalls.
Maybe, this is, even if a bad one, is an explanation of why it’s possible to love someone more, with each passing moment, hour, day and year, since their departure from our life, because with each successive recall,we blur,we soften the edges between what once was and what we wished could have been. We chase after these memories not only because we miss our beloved, or that we feel robbed of our certainty of a future together, but because we miss our own self.
You see, when we love,truly love someone, the locus of their existence, casts a shadow over us, that slowly becomes a part of our own existence, our own identity, and the space we afford ourselves,grows a bit larger. Following their exit,we carry with ourselves a phantom identity, phantom habits and reflexes,reaching out for something that’s not there anymore,that’s not ours anymore. We turn to what’s left,what’s ours,our memories,out of sheer desperation, to remember what it was like,to be whole. We chase after memories like dogs in our dreams,like an addict, because deep down, there’s a void, and we are intelligent enough to know how to fill it, but we are doomed with the overwhelming desire not to.As we grow older, our memories become mythical stories to soothe our pain,and with no witness but us, no jury but us, every now and then, we let go of the finer details, we let go of truth, not because we want to,but we want to be relieved of its prerogative. This is why, if we suddenly meet our beloved again, there’s a brief jarring undercurrent of hope where hope was once lost, this hope is about stillness, this hope is about a rebellion against the very condition of one’s existence, one hopes that his beloved is as his memory tells him.
One begins to understand memory,when one understands the balance, the ratio between what to retain(treasure) and what to let go. One must be satisfied in knowing that the this ratio tends to towards an unevenness as time progresses. What begins as a large chunk of memory,if not recalled frequently enough,stays in a corner of our library,slowly eroding away over time,but it doesn’t disappear,it becomes infinitesimally small over time,almost on the verge of being forgotten.We do not control what we can forget,we can control what we wish to ignore,and hope that we slowly forget it over time,but unfortunately,we do not control what we can forget.In essence,we forget a lot of life we have lived,loved,enjoyed,suffered and hated,a lot of life is translated into the art of forgetting and letting go.
One can ceaselessly critique another,for falsifying facts,for distorting the past.Memories have no obligation to truth,how does one bring himself,to critique his own memory? To doubt the very source of his survival,in his most private and desperate moments? Scraps of memory that relieves him of pain,however false it may be,however distorted it may be,is his piece of past,past he believes he was once a part of. If we siphon the past off of him,what remains of him? What is a man without a past?What is a man who doesn’t remember?What is a character without a story?What is a civilization without history?To erase something,one starts with it’s memory.We are left with human coffins,when have done nothing but have liquidated memories because they are not honest.When we have done nothing but deprived a man of his refuge,in his very own memory,we have performed a surgical invasion into the self,we have re-invented the self,what we have achieved is nothing short of a murder,and this time,we are not guilty.
Memory is both a refuge and a reminder of our fragility.