Memory

Most of my memories are indistinct and blurry. I was married for five years in my early twenties, and I remember almost none of it. This frightens me because I had a routine with this man--we must have shopped together, slept together, made the bed together. A myriad of things, routines, and love--was there love? not sure--have all been erased. And the me of the past. If I were to meet her, she would be a complete stranger. She was an unformed dough-like girl who still somehow stubbornly refused to be molded. He couldn't make biscuits of her, or croissants, or bread. All of the Amy Grant songs and required attendance at church every Sunday couldn't make her into the good wife he wanted. Who was this girl who ever thought she could do that?

If I try to review my life in my head, it's a film with great chunks edited out. Sometimes the picture goes out, and I hear just voices--what someone said, how they sounded when they said it. Sometimes I reconstruct the picture to go with the voice. "Maybe I looked like this when he said that." "Maybe I was doing this."

I reconstruct the memories for convenience, for clarity, for virtue. "No..that didn't happen that way. It happened this way." This one proves that I am good. This one proves that I am evil. And it is the same memory. The same one.

Sometimes an ex-something will say, "Do you remember?" And I usually don't. I don't remember the proposal. I don't remember his cooking that for me.

I remember a song that played. I remember feeling pieces of myself leaving me. I thought I would get them back, but I don't think I ever did.