Memory is a slippery beast, especially as a person becomes
older and stores more memories in the crannied, gray recesses of the brain. It
seems that the brain would eventually run out of room for new memories, but no, it just finds new dark hideaways, like maybe behind the recipe for your
grandmother’s biscuits or underneath the dusty blanket that covers the time the
dog tried to bite you when you were four-years-old. And during our day-to-day
life of going to school, working, raising children, paying bills, most of those
memories stay locked away, but come night as our body relaxes and inches
towards the oblivion of sleep, some stubborn random memories refuse to stay
shut away. They want to breathe again and they pop out like Jack-in-the-Boxes
without the warning music:
Talking to my latest teen crush when a bird flew over and shit
directly on my head.
My high school German teacher insisting he smelled Grape
deodorant in the classroom, when in fact it was the reek of marijuana.
Sea urchins with their black spines poking up from the salty
Mediterranean sea foam like Neptune ’s goth
needles.
A flash of Angus Young jumping high on stage in his school
boy outfit while he made his guitar scream the rift to Whole Lotta Rosie.
The backyard clothes line undulating like some twisted
Escher painting as waves from the earthquake turned the land to jelly.
Searching hopelessly for Tippy whom I’d been told had run
away.
The small contractions that singled the birth of my first
child and me thinking naively “This isn’t so bad.”
Weeping to a former lover that I did indeed want him back,
when I really didn’t.
The crease-faced old woman in Crete giving me the gourd
canteen her grandfather had used in the Turkey
There are the words I wish I had said, words I wish I hadn’t
said, people I wish I hadn’t hurt. Shame flames and inches up my body to my
cheeks until they are on fire.
An old love who turned into my worst enemy and anger
flares.
My dad's lopsided smile, as if he couldn’t decide if he should smile or
not.
I take each memory out as they push to the surface and
examine them individually before locking them away again, never knowing when
they will again reach up from the depths of my brain and assault me. I go to
bed every night wondering which ones will crawl forth like a wet mewling
newborn demanding to be reborn as I slip towards sleep.
What is the purpose of these memories? Couldn’t I function
just as well, or maybe better, if I could somehow purge them? Why can’t I
remember important happenings in my life yet recall insignificant ones in
detail? The little brown dress with the alphabet across the bodice. The way my
mother’s face twisted when she realized I had snipped my hair off
unevenly with her scissors. The placement of the candy dish in one childhood
home- the candy dish that never held candy. The location of nearly every
bathroom in the 30 odd houses I’ve lived in my life. How after the Robin
Trower concert everyone sounded like Minnie Mouse and I humiliatingly ran face
first into a pole. My phone number in Texas
Why in the hell do these
memories bubble to the surface just as sleep begins to overtake me, grabbing me
so violently that I am shoved away from the line that denotes the conscious
world from the unconscious one, only to slip back down again after I examine
the memory thoroughly? And where do they go afterwards? Back into the same hiding
place, or does my brain construct new boxes to hold them? So many boxes of different sizes. Some with secure
locks and some that aren’t secure. So many hidden corners and crevices and
hidey holes and dark closets.
When my brain’s electrical impulses are interrupted like a
t.v signal suddenly switched off, those memories will also cease to exist
unless I tell someone about them.
And I just put a few of those memories out into the
universe. Now, in a way, they’re yours too.
