halftime

edited freewrite

“Letters are just pieces of paper… Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish.”

People can be so selective about the way they want to remember things. When it comes down to it, the very memories I retain are compartmentalized, classified and neatly tucked away on a subconscious level. There are the things I wish I could hold on to for a lifetime—all of the minor details of a day spent out; the comments that induced laughter and mirth among friends, at the most random times/settings; past conversations held in coffee shops and bedrooms, at trails in the park and food joints, on apartment balconies and in transit. And there are the things I wish I could quickly forget, words both spoken aloud and left unsaid, images that bring me back to less pleasant times.

And yet the unsettling irony I’ve found is that it doesn’t matter how much I try to pick and choose the images that stay with me, to shape the truth in my recollections. The memories that linger—the ones that surface unexpectedly, barging in on your thoughts before you go to bed or when you sit at your desk in the middle of the day with nothing to do—aren’t necessarily the best ones, or even the most vividly detailed ones. It’s the ones that leave a deep impression under the surface, the broad, crude strokes scattered among all the minute etchings of day to day life. And even as I aim to hold on to entire memories, they fade at the edges until the details are no longer accessible, and only the raw emotions attached to them can be recalled.

On some days, this truth makes me sad because the majority of life is experienced at the fringes, held in the details; when the specifics of a memory can no longer be conjured readily, it makes me feel like I lost something important. On other days, ….

I no longer really know where I am going with this. I had some general direction in mind but it is now clear to me I need some sleep