Brain Souvenirs

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/ Greek war.

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 rises from around a dark corner of my nearly asleep brain, as does my ex’s social security number. I can summon up the sharp reek of brown bottled rush (ispbutyl nitrate), see against the backs of my eyelids as the Texas air turns to rippled green silk, hear the low hum and throttle of a teen boyfriend’s motorcycle as it rounds the corner to my street. 

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.