erasure of memories..♥April 28, 2005♥ prev/next♥
I contemplate the thread of destiny when a picture of him falls like the insubstantial crisscrossing of a feather. It lands after a series of slow motion wavers, it lands with a strange chemistry of no sense of direction and the density of fate.
He was eight, scrawny and abounding with that childhood fervency that is always so photogenic-- a spitfire rustling in the eyes. He would grow up to watch me sleeping; I would startle awake and his stare would be wide and undisturbed, searching for freckles or the cadence of rem fluttering. He would grow up to love a girl who made him listen to jazz, who made him watch foreign films and asked him to dance to Depeche Mode and The Magnetic Fields on a veranda that overlooked the gulf of mexico. He would be someone who would admit to liking love songs begrudgingly, someone who took snapshots of me while I protested with the unconvincing murmurs of just waking from slumber. He would be someone who could watch the moon for over an hour and not feel the need to contemplate its silhouette out loud.
I picked up the picture and put it in a box, something that closes, something that can be shoved under my bed. The most delicate art is the art of erasure: what we do to forget is as elusory as what we do to remember.