Memories/Skin

Why would a person want tokens from their past? Why would they keep things that upon holding them in their hand could make them sad? Evoke an array of feelings. Is it not better to erase things? To file them away in your brain as far away from your immediate memory as possible?

No. I have labeled, altered, hid, and run from memories. Surely I need to let go of some, physical and otherwise, but I like to keep pieces of people, and stories. I want to have tangible things that remind me of who I was, who I am, who I've loved. I can re-write how I see them, but I do not want to delete them.

In but 3 decades I have been so many people, yet wearing the same skin. How? How can it be? I have been beautiful, and ugly. Sweet, and cruel. I have loved, and I have hurt people, I have been careless with mine and others' hearts. And some of that I wish I could forget. I find it interesting, and impossible, that people claim that they do not have regrets, that they learn from their choices etc, and do not hold onto them. To me I think you can do both, because I have. I hold regrets, and I learn from them, or try to. That doesn't mean I should dwell on them, which I am wont to do on occasion. But it means I know them. Our actions are burned into us, imprinted on our souls, and in our thoughts and there patterns and development. I see them in me, the good and the bad. I see them in the creases around my eyes - the laugh lines, the aging, the marks. These are all parts of a complex life, a human existence.

Life is a series of choices. Some that, my God, I would do differently. I cannot pretend otherwise. It is always difficult to say that though. If I love the people in my current life, and I know it is the actions I have taken that led me to them, then how can I say I would do things differently? Because this string of reality, this person that I am, would not exist; so I would not know what I am losing. Just like I do not know what I would have gained had I not made certain decisions. The primary reason I would not do things again is not for my happiness being more or less than it is, but for a chance to not have hurt the people I love. That is what I would rather erase. Remove the stains from my actions in the way that they affected other people. Nothing is harder for me than knowing that I have hurt my family and friends.

Life is like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. I turned to page 32 instead of 67. I took one path, if I had taken another, which literally could have been one different turn of a page, then I would not be who I am. The lines on my face would be different. And other people's lives would be different.

That is one of the things that is so amazing about reality, if any of us had made one different decision, turned to page 59 instead of 91, not gone to a BBQ one night, or even returned a call, we would not be where we are. Some people would say that that is the marker, the sign or thing that tells us we are where we are meant to be. And perhaps they are correct. Because every cause has an effect, ever action a reaction, but that doesn't make all of our actions okay; and it doesn't mean that I should erase what happened before I turned those pages. Before I altered the course of mine and others' lives.

So my original question, why would a person want tokens from their past, really does tie into this. We have taken our paths, chosen our inadvertent adventures, but we are creating, and sadly forgetting, memories all along the way. For me in an effort to live with the bad, I have sometimes altered the good. To make me look or feel better for things I chose. Or I have forgotten the good, it has been overshadowed by the darker story lines; so the tangibles sometimes help refocus the intangible. They help ground some memories, remind me of love, of happiness in the same skin but as a different person.

In many ways people may never change, but in many, many others, everything else about them can be different. I have remained ever the same, yet I am a dramatically different person living a dramatically different life since I turned from page 31. It is a difficult dance between knowing, remember, forgiving, forgetting, wanting to keep, or hold onto pieces of the past - all of these components. But we are the sum of many parts, which means we carry those within us, and sometimes we should carry them outside too. On a shelf, or in a closet. Or in a box.

when the sun & moon stop dancing

I watch the horizon. I watch the melting lights. I see the colors bleed as the darkness falls. I feel the weight of night as it is sliding in, and then quickly conquering the day. At winter, at least. Winter is the time of the conquering. In summer the day and night dance, they state up late together and laugh. But in Fall they start to distance, every year the same, pulling and pushing at evening, and by the full throws of winter, the storms that lack the enthusiasm of lightening and thunder on warm wet days, the light is pushed down deeply - completely, traceless.

That is this week. This month. Months? The darkness started with a creeping and then spread. It has invaded all of the pieces. The sum of the parts make a messy mosaic. The colors go bland and the aching prevails as the tiles expand and contract while the glue tries to breathe but cannot as it is pressed together, art on background, forced to stick and dry. It is as though all of the light stood in the back and the glue poured over it, tiles at first delicately placed, developing their image, were then pushed aside by this parade of madness as the pieces fell. The picture, less discernible, except for the memory. Brains, hearts, and bodies have memories of their own, unconsciously formed. They have this memory, or shadow of a shape that you can see, feel - if you look closely enough.

This season's mosaic is like that. The images cry out calling for splashes of color occasionally pushing through only to be pushed down by the heaviness of the night sky. I am left begging the stars to come out. Pleading with the constellations to fight for me. But deaf can be the ears of the heavens. Not the ears of God. But the universe's tongue goes quiet, and the sea of people around, even with their love, joy, and beauty melting into me, they do not sustain. So I go home and the river within purges itself, spilling out into my strained subjective reality.

The madness on parade, within, with out swallows the sensibilities, the faculties, and compress a whole girl into a small box - big enough for an ocean of sadness, small enough to hide within.

Tonight the rain will not fall, just a dark curtain leans in on me. Heavy it hangs, strung across the sky.