It's late in the evening, quickly approaching midnight. The moon is full and the beams have broke through the window pane, spilling across the floor and spreading across the bed in which I lay. My mind races backwards and forwards on my internal timeline, seeing faces, hearing loving statements and sentiments long since gone in the wispy tendrils of fading memory.
It's 1993 in a gymnasium where I'm sitting in a metal folding chair, draped in polyester robes, sweating profusely as someone stands at a lectern delivering a speech about leaving childhood behind or something as equally banal, stock, and innocuous as most speeches in high school are wont to come off. I remember the photo from 1992, dressed in a two piece hunter green suit sitting in a vinyl chair trying to look stoic and mature. I had a thicker head of hair and not as much weight around the middle.
It's 2013 and I'm sitting cross legged in front of a laptop exercising my creative muscles trying to put onto the screen the remnants of memory before I lose them forever. I wish I could be able to tap into my brain's potential capacity to keep things clear and defined. Categorized and cataloged. Time changes everything is what I've read and quickly understand. There's another great line from a film called Magnolia where it goes "we may be done with the past, but, the past isn't done with us". I don't know exactly what this means in the overall context of this post other than it seems pretty truthful.
I sometimes try and recall past girlfriends and lovers, remembering their attractive qualities. The way their hair fell just so. A smile, the way their eyes looked, a walk, simple gestures with speaking and not saying anything. I have longed since mined the resource of regret and self pity at the failures of these relationships. It's not my fault. It's not my fault. I want to tattoo this on me if I didn't have any regret about doing this afterward.
I'm gardening my mind. Tilling the fertile soil of creativity, tossing out the weeds of negativity that can strangle and kill good thoughts. I'm above that nihilistic thinking that permeated my thoughts in the last decade. I want to cultivate the things that make me smile and chortle a little.
1996- a photo booth in West Park Mall. There was so much hope and happiness in our eyes. I filled a composition book for Christmas in poetry, illustrations, stories. Forgoing the usual gift, though, I'm sure I got one of those.
2000- Sitting on a couch in my living room, staring out my window for a visitor who would never come. I listened to Sand In the Vaseline The Best of The Talking Heads. It would be a few years later when I awake from sleep to notice the time of a nocturnal visit from a former girlfriend, that was in all likelihood a potential physical encounter, pass with no call nor apology. It just happened.
2004- With a girl in a hotel room as we make out in happenstance. 1994- heavy petting and dry humping lead to a premature accident that is forwarded as a punch line for the girl's friends. 1997- sobbing like some infant over a breakup 2007- fighting back tears after a knock on the door informed me that a very good friend of mine had asphyxiated on his own vomit in his apartment. Going through the apartment days later and horrified by the degradation of the place. Caps of duster litter the floor along with trash, pizza boxes, and beer bottle caps. 1995- sharing feelings to this tender red head, and getting brushed off by capricious youth. 2005- Her now ex boyfriend getting confrontational about it while he was half conscious and fully drunk.
I have to stop. Entranced by the power of the moon tonight. Memories can wait.
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