Reality,
liquid, diffuse, infinitely malleable.
Pour reality, thick and oozing, into a vessel
and it takes shape,
it seems to solidify,
it adds weight.
The vessel becomes more complete,
full of meaning, of surety, of the real,
and yet that self same reality has been shaped
bound and defined by the very object it, in turn, defines.
I have spent so much time on this question. In my life, I have had one mother, two mother figures, three fathers, two sisters, five brothers. I now have no sisters, one brother, one father, a stepfather, a mother-figure, and a mother. All of them have tried to define my life differently. All of them have told me stories of who I was, what I did, where I have been. Some of them have lied, some have been lost, some of them won’t talk about the past at all. Who are we without a past? I have often felt, upon hearing or relating stories from my life that I was hearing or telling a story from a book; someone else’s story. What emotional connections are required to our past, to our history, to our memory? Without emotional connection, is some of the truth lost? How much of this emotional truth is necessary to the construction of a reality, a personal story? I have scars on my body and I don’t know where they are from. I have memories of events that I’m not sure ever happened.
Memory,
Fickle,
brutally enigmatic,
what stays, what goes,
what comes back, and where was it in the lost time?
A moment, a smell, a day, a face, a life,
lost with the slow decay of time or the suddenness of an instant,
How to be sure it happened,
what proofs do we need for our lives?
Does it matter if I lie? How can I ever be sure, when I tell you a story, when I relate an amusing anecdote, when I tearfully recall a personal torment, that I am not fabricating, expanding, embellishing? How much objective truth is required in my life? What shall I be required to know of myself to be fully human? If an event occurs, or it does not occur, shall I demand evidence to trust my memory? I don’t remember what I ate on June 4th, 1993. Does that mean I ate nothing? Does it mean that what I ate was inconsequential? To whom? Who decides what I get to know or forget, what feels real and what feels distant? Can a dream be readily dismissed just because the reality of the physical world is in denial of our memory? Why are still afraid of the dark? As a young man, I was told stories of my past that I know are not true, that I always should have doubted, that never made sense for an instant, and yet I believed I remembered them, because I had heard the story so often, and because any past is preferable to none.
