Prosaic Tribute to Remembering
In youth,
your images were crystalline life-like portraits of photographic quality light burning brightly a hot spotlight panning backgrounds, things said and written.
I recalled most everything. We could have reenacted everything on the stage — the stage being anywhere at anytime.
Times, names, dates, births, deaths, marriages, celebrations, family members new and old, tried and young — I was a mobile Rolodex.
Four decades and I often compare you to disk space and an overfull disk drive. My recall, my ability to retain will now refrain.
From holding on to anything. I was not a person who repeated a story for I remembered everyone I had shared it with previously.
In midlife,
the images are blurred some. Vignette filters creep at the edges encroaching on my ability to bring items back clearly. My need to know, my yearning for knowledge has cooled like a retiring wizened windbag.
The mobile Rolodex already an almost forgotten relic of a not-so-distant past. More entries try and push their way in, if successful, where does that leave the entries lost to “edge creep?”
Letting go. They tell us it’s good to. That it makes space for new, for the good, for fresh starts, and beginnings. But how often is letting go a learned forgetfulness, a burning to lose, to become numb, to be washed away with the tide of giving in?
In the future of my elder life,
I want to swim.
In written memories, in the flotsam and jetsam of moments that stuck around on the surface, and dive with my mermaid’s scales a shimmering to the depths to run my hands over the rough edged, textured, barnacled rock crevasses slick with moss — to unveil, to touch but more importantly be touched by the souvenirs and trinkets that remain.
Visual representation of an excerpt on @tolbert_on_medium Instagram.
