Memory is a Funny Thing

A Poem by tzippibird

Prose poetry trying to make sense of memory

1. flashback

Red Smith once said, “writing is easy, you just open a vein and bleed,”

I don’t know if I’d say the same, but pressing a pen to paper and allowing my vibrating thoughts to trickle and take shape is the only thing keeping me here.

Otherwise, I’d fly away, or freeze, my physical body rooted in place while my mind spun away into memory.

Memory is a funny thing.

It starts as I speak with my therapist. It starts with one of these spells where the mind’s eye supersedes those set in the skull. It starts, crashing over me like a wave, sudden as a riptide. The images flicker across my vision and rip through body. I struggle through the layers of consciousness… my words tangling, sticking to my throat. I lace my fingers into my hair and tug, trying to ground myself through pain.

I slip back under.

Breath fails me.

My throat closes.

I break the surface once more, to my therapist speaking my name.

“Hey...are you there? Do you know… where you are”

I hear as though through layers of static.

I.. yea..um uh

Several strands of hair were entwined in my fist, torn from my scalp.

Memory is a funny thing. This moment contains all that preceded it.

I am fully submerged once more, the past, for me, no longer past, but present.

Everything goes blank.

When I reenter myself, I feel like you do when you gulp air after drowning; or maybe, when you wake from a bad dream to your pounding heart and sweat stained sheets.

My therapist has leaned forward, I feel my eyes slide into focus.

“Hey. You’re here.”

I nod, not fully believing. I am treading water. Exhausted, numb.

“Where were you?”

I shrug. I’m not sure if I remember.

She nods. “It’s okay if you don’t know. Or if you don’t feel ready to tell me.”

I shudder-breathe, and nod. To my embarrassment, I feel tears sliding from my eyes. I close them, trying to gather myself.

I open them and look at the clock. We are 20 minutes into the next session.

Ugh.

This is dangerous.

2. Enouement ^1

Being home is always an adjustment for me. It feels like everywhere I turn, there is a sly reminder of something buried, or something which isn’t quite like what I remember it.

I remember this smell, the sun warm pine-y smell of wooden boards in summer.

The floor creaks maybe a little more.

My room is smaller than I remember; the white washed ceiling, filled with fine cracks a little closer to my bed. After two hard reminders, I finally adjust to the change in distance and avoid knocking my head.

My Rabbi once told me, when I am able, to try to look at my past self and feel genuine compassion and recognition of her. Like I am greeting a sister or something.

I look around the room, at volumes of myths and poetry and nonfiction and science fiction, of untidy sketches which look increasingly crude to my more seasoned eye.

Is this where I start?

I don’t believe in nostalgia, I disdain sentimentality. The past is the past. I still feel the mark of it, and in addition to the scars, the frustration of the time that I lost in my life. It is a bitter and heady brew, laced with salty tears and regret.

(Only recently, have I begun trying to imprint the memories which feed a hungry heart, a collage of images I like to spread out and wrap myself in)

But still. Being in this place of past and yesterday and back then, I see who I was, a girl of needs gapingly open and unmet, in all her vulnerability, her anger, her hunger.

I turn to my dresser mirror, and grimace, contorting my face the way I did at age ten. The girl in the mirror does the same. I brush the cobwebs from my eyes. Hers--the same color and shape as mine--glint, like the copper pennies I used to cast into the well.

Then I relax, pressing my palm to the glass.

Is this what she meant? Am I to see her, and reach for her? I have been trying so long to escape her.

It is the strangest sense of énouement.

3. Instinct (collective conscious)

Evident to anyone studying history or mythology is the ephemerality of human memory. Our heroes, our gods, we have condemned to parallel our own follies; a faltering we enact again and again and again.

Attempting to document is a Sisyphean task; we attempt to capture our error and learn--creating labyrinthine stacks in the library, compendiums of lore, tragedies, absurdist comedy-- but self-awareness always falls just short of it.

So say the old to the young--- those who have grown wise and weary sigh, and those who remain fools allow their faults to harden, the years caking and carving into them, festering beneath layers of dust and tangles of cobwebs.

The young recreate them afresh and timeless, infinite variations spooling into the same inevitability.

The idealist within me screams that history isn’t destiny, any more than biology determines destiny. But as someone who works with data, I cannot avoid seeing the patterns. Watch as we create and recreate the tableau, the themes fueling them are consistent.

We know that memory fails to last. Or is it that we remember to much? Maybe it’s caught in our muscles, and we lack the control to subdue the impulse.

4. Primal

The jerk of the familiar

Raises welts upon my skin

Spinal shiver,

Ancestral sense

Bones quiver

Muscles tense

The scene around me blurs

Heart hiccoughs, shudders

Trail an inexorable ribbon

Stretching towards the sky

Briars tearing skin