brambles

Today's been a strange day.

It's been a day of fighting, struggling, fearing the future to the point of being nearly crippled by it, by the fog in my head, by my own uncertainties and insecurities, still, about who I am. But I didn't only lose myself today, I found pieces of myself, through a perfect stranger, through the words of old friends carried like fallen leaves down a stream. I think no one really knows what the smallest, idlest interactions mean to me now. The feeling of connection. The consciousness of chance.

I think I've forgotten a great deal. I noticed my memory isn't as sharp as it used to be. I used to remember the smallest details, every whitish-pink-grey scale on a pigeon's clubbed, maimed foot as it tottered on the windowsill, the sound of a stranger laughing, the dizzying whirl of a young man doing capoeira in Riverside Park. Back when remembering details was so benign and happy. Once I could, did, and wanted to memorize whole concertos. Thirty-five minutes of my hands flying on keys, with summer-rain fields and kettle drums and chocolate notes and golden bells spilling forth beneath my eyelids. When is the last time I truly saw and remembered? I wrote to an old friend some weeks ago; she recalled more about whole years of my life than I did.

I think some lines somewhere are crossed.

Searching for solace, I turned again to the internet. These days it seems to be an acceptable thing, to search for elusive connections on an increasingly wired, wireless world. I feel trapped between the motion of modernity and my yearning for a past that I recall, blurry form slightly rough yet firm beneath my fingers, like a newly picked apple.

I reached through time and I found that the people I once needed so badly are still there, we are all still alive, still existing, still changing, growing, living. Different now, our stories dispersed, our paths no longer crossed nor parallel nor even within earshot. But I still remember you, all of your faces, your voices, the shape of your gait, the plait of your hair, the way you softly tasted the words you spoke before speaking, the gorgeous blue of your eyes magnified into gemstones by the thick lenses you wore. I remember when we would laugh and run about in the darkness and imagine all of our dreams together. I remember when you told me the story that was your brainchild, and about the boy who inspired them, and the story of your childhood together, and I wished so hard that your happiness would form from the words you created, as if, if we believed enough, fantasy and reality would be one and the same.

About around that time I begin to remember a lot of shame, a lot of guilt. No features, but laughter at me, eyes looking at me, fingers pointing. After that I remember only pieces.

It must be a defense mechanism, this forgetting. I feel as though I've forgotten several years of my life.

Today my mind spun a web on itself, building more layers of forget and despair as brown leaves tumbled across the grass outside. When I couldn't take anymore disintegration I contacted a stranger. A perfectly anonymous, imperfect stranger.

These days when I get to know someone they become completely off-limits when I become depressed. I don't want to scare any more people away than I have already. Because I need too much, sometimes. Most of the time I need nothing and will take nothing and will only give, give, until I have nothing left of me to give and even then from some unknowable reserve I will continue to give, but sometimes when I need it comes in floods and nothing can stop that feeling of being utterly helpless, mentally paralyzed, incessantly, impossibly, exasperatingly full of excuses and negativity. It's drowned relationships and friendships alike. I've burnt so many perfectly stable bridges because of my needing, or my fear of it, or both; but I can't need a stranger, so it must be safe.

Stranger said some things I should have written down. Stranger was trained to say those things, and maybe was paid too, but nevermind that. Stranger said there was a part of me yearning to live life again and open up again and be a person again, which I have not been. Stranger said I've accomplished a great deal, which is a lot, coming from a perfect stranger. There were some other things that Stranger said, words that stung behind my eyes when I read them and made me remember to breathe, but all I remember of the words is the stinging and the breathing. Which may have been the point, may have been enough.

I wish I could rewind time and change many things I've done, just to see. Would I be where I am now, if I'd held onto the ribbon connecting us to the earth? If I hadn't cut my own string, trusting the wind to take me where I fell? I wish I had lived my life better, that I'd known how to live, because I seem to remember so very little, my memory is peppered with patches of thistles bristling stubbornly with shame and regret about what must be tiny insignificant things. Tiny glitches, erasing swathes of precious data...

Better yet, I wish I could rewind time just to watch and remember the things I've missed. To tease apart all of the memories that made me erase my other memories. Maybe I have lived, after all, and only refuse to remember.

Sometimes I wonder about the people I once knew. If I reached out to you now, after all this time, would you remember me?