when you get to my age
what you want more than anything,
whether you admit it or not,
is a better memory.
I’ve spent most of my life
trying to remember the things
that made me, mostly,
so that I could share the story
of how I was made
and how it felt being me
back to myself.
The more these memories
conjured a sense of place
inside me,
the more substantial I felt.
I could distill for a self
drunk on creativity
that regardless of the moments
I always felt misting away from
me in slow motion,
my life was always primarily
about caring and being loved
and that that would somehow
make the grief of losing
what it meant to know me
part of the story,
and so never really lost.
In the last two weeks
I’ve had two people in my life
remark on how
I have such a good memory
and I told them what I usually say
when someone says this to me,
which is I’ve had a lifetime
writing autobiography
and memory narrative,
and that popping a thought
and following what story
digresses out of it
across the page of my life
from past to present
is my wheelhouse.
In truth, like everybody,
I’ve spent a lot of my life
trying to make memories,
when I should have been trying
to deeply understand
and more fully discover
the ones I already had,
where making one
memorable moment after
another actually became
a ritual in forgetting,
a kind of self-starting addiction,
where focusing compulsively
on making my life
was actually me forgetting
the one I was bored with.
The difference is,
I know that to be alive
is to wake up and recognize
I’m full of it,
and I believe
that’s the real timeless
and interesting story.
I like imagining that’s what
the ancient Taoist masters
were getting at
when they defined
the concept of Wu wei,
or non-doing.
I can practice simply sitting
and reviewing memory
that is always unspooling
back into a me
that’s always been here,
in order to get back
to the nature of feeling
like I am as much a dream
sitting here, watching
my illusory life movie
come and go,
as I am an illusory movie
watching me watch it.
each torquing, contrary,
nesting doll
strategy meant to telescope
perspective until I feel
like I’m a seamlessly told
memory that’s waking up in
carefully controlled increments
from inside another raging
river of want,
where as the author of my life
I’m looking to forget
and remember myself
at the same time
in order to finally end
as an embodiment of that
enlightened humble pie
moment that says, now what?