Memory Markers
With collective and personal cycles clearing away, memories are resurfacing. The good, bad, and even hideous moments show in glimpses like remembering a nightmare from a few weeks back. Some people shoo these thoughts away, while others sink into the memories trying to make sense of it all.
These reminders come in all forms; certain scents and visuals, touch sense, and taste. The way the light dances across my floor, and dapples the grassy lawn reminds me of simpler times before the chaos of entering my double digits years. This was the time of watching and listening to the silence, taking in the world as it is, learning from moment to moment the ways of this world. The scent of earth brings me back to exploring the wilderness of upstate New York, pulling at ferns and tripping over sticks, forgetting the way back, relying on my sister's navigational skills back to the cabin. Experiencing the careless grip of lusting hands jolts me to soothing my child self in real time, bare, heart racing, reminding me of unspoken boundaries several times crossed. I think of these as memory markers, visualized as gathered fabric pinned down in specific places.
Memories store themselves in our brain and body. Though they change every time we recite them to ourselves. What a heartbreaking bit of information I wish I never learned. The more we recite the special moments we want to savor, they get further, and blurry. Yes, the present moment is the only real-time to Be in, but what about the voices of our loved ones never recorded? What about holding your sweet baby and feeling the weight of their sleeping forms in your arms? The times of looking into your lover's eyes that no longer stand with you? The colors fade, and the grasp is just out of reach.
Sometimes a wave of gratefulness comes across me, filling my mind with my travels and the people I have loved. Beyond the pain, expectations, breakups, the constricting moments, there is the feeling of pure experience of being here as a human. A seat above it all allows me to see the timeline at a distance. A place where all is well as the world turns, even with the destruction and violence that we hear of every day. I'd like to sit there in that seat more often, not saturated by different timelines running a parallel course
Much Love,
Gabrielle