What We Remember

What we forget

Journal: 29 August, 2024, morning.

“Everyday life is a sack with holes. And you carry it anyway.”

-Marina Tsvetaeva

The imagery (that worn and frayed sack with holes) has stayed with me since I first read this, many years ago. I mean, what else are we going to do? What choice do we have?

We soldier on, shedding things, people, memories.

I try so hard to live with my eyes wide open, to see the world, to *really* see it. Sometimes I see something so tenderly exquisite that I tell myself “I’m going to remember this,” and I always mean it, and there’s no way I can possibly remember all those moments in a lifetime. How grievous is that? I do that, tell myself I will, knowing full well I probably won’t.

There are people who can. Marilou Henner, for one. She has hyperthymesia (or it has her), the ability to recall precisely almost every event in her life. Everything. I do not think necessarily that we should envy her. Remembering some things in your history is like thinking about nuclear destruction: difficult to stand and do the dishes while contemplating that, so we don’t. Most of the time, anyway.

My friend Eddie is passionate about songs being little memory time machines, pre-programmed ones, swoosh, those first notes, and there you are, back in 1962, “oh, what a night,” or eyeing those dashboard lights, or standing there with Segar, watching the train roll by with your past life on the other side of the tracks, forever unreachable.

Ephemeral. Life is ephemeral.

Will I, some years from now, remember this early morning? Remember sitting here, writing this, the whisper of the fan, Henri sighing sleepily in his bed? Probably not, but there’s joy in it anyway. I love the sack with holes in it that is my life. I carry it willingly, happily. And I try to put as much in it as I possibly can.

#journalingalife