Hi world. ❤

Happy last day of August.

Here is a hot take on moving on, memory, and what it means to visit the grave of who you have been with fresh flowers in hand.

A SPASM OF REMEMBRANCE

I was driving to class this morning when Toto’s iconic “Africa” started playing and I nearly swerved out of my lane in a spasm of remembrance.

My best guy friend in high school was completely obsessed with that song. The first time he ever played it for me, we were lying on the football field, exhausted from running sprints, basking in the peace that falls upon a high school campus after everyone goes home. This being just before we learned how to drive, we were waiting for our rides, talking. It was one of those moments that you can almost feel slipping from your fingers even as you are still holding onto it.

I remember him telling me his secrets and me telling him mine as we waited there, not just for our moms, but for the rest of our lives. We would dream out loud about what it might feel like to be twenty, or in college, or somewhere that wasn’t where we were right then, baking under the sun in dirty track socks, to the sound of Toto. And for the rest of that year that melody became a theme song of sorts. It was the soundtrack of fifteen.

So when I heard it today, on the middle of the freeway all of these years later, I could still feel the artificial turf of the football field poking my back as I stretched out under the sun, long after practice had ended, talking about the very years that I am inside of now.

WATERING DEAD THINGS

I think a lot about those days, as anyone who reads this blog will tell you. I don’t think that this is particularly strange, considering they were not all that long ago, but it can sometimes feel like watering dead things. Maybe that’s just what it feels like to be a writer, or really, a human. Maybe reflection and dissection is how we learn and move forward. But then I read this quote on Pinterest last night:

“And I have stopped bringing flowers to the grave of the teenager I used to be.”

-Blythe Baird

It made me think of how just that day alone, I had seen the ghost of the first boy who ever held my hand, sitting at the bottom of the golf course I drive past every day. And the shadow of the girl I used to tell everything to, leaning against the wall of the coffee shop we would always hide away in. And the giggle of my five year old self, riding the carousel in the park that I just happened to be walking through.

Why I was seeing these things at all is what made me think though. Why were certain times of life so punctuated with immensity? Why did this or that one thing that happened matter so much? Why can I still feel it? Maybe my guilt or shame over still feeling things long after they have occurred is just a side effect of living in a world that often makes us feel bad over feeling anything for too long. A world that mistakes apathy for maturity, emotional numbness for a healthy sign of having moved on. I’m constantly trying to override these narratives that have been shoved down my throat like sedatives to keep me quiet.

But maybe, sometimes, thinking about the past is not so much a sign of discontent with the present, as much as it is a desperate wish to hold the hand of the girl that you were when she needed it most. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and sit up in my bed and lose my breath as tears run down my face just thinking about the little girl that didn’t know how to block punches yet. The little girl who didn’t understand so many of the things that would feel a little bit like dying to learn. 

So it’s hard to not always bring flowers to the grave of that girl. It’s hard to let anything rest in peace when the death of it is still reverberating through your bones like one of those springy metal door stoppers that you think the whole world can hear every time you accidentally kick it. Living in the city you grew up in is like kicking it all of the time. It’s like stubbing your toe on the jagged corners of the past everywhere that you go.

KALEIDOSCOPIC MEMORIES

All of this is to say that I don’t know if I will ever stop bringing flowers to the graves of my past selves, and I don’t know if I should want to either. Our experiences are all that we have. If we forget them, if we try to abandon them too quickly, what’s the point? As a writer, the past is my tool. It’s like paint to a painter.

But I suppose what I’m really trying to argue is that it should be the tool of any human. I think we put too much importance on moving on quickly and seamlessly. Or, we misunderstand how highly nuanced of an experience moving on really is. I moved on a long time ago from most of the things that I write about, but I still write about them. Why? Because they still teach me things. They still make me feel things. Most of the moments of my life are like books in that I come back to them again and again and each time, they teach me something new. I call them kaleidoscopic memories, or ones that are ever changing in the light.

The point is, I think we get it wrong. People are always in such a hurry to get over things and to take pride in never feeling anything about them again. I don’t get that. It seems antithetical to being human. Our graveyards are full of wisdom. I bring flowers all of the time.

Love, m.

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