#16: fragments of a memory

tinted with nostalgia

Memory is an unreliable historian and a fervent curator.

She confuses dates and locations yet precisely recounts scents and sentences. She is always accompanied by her co-conspirator, Nostalgia, who she has been courting for a long, long time.

Nostalgia doesn’t say much. She doesn’t need to. Words, images, and sounds only concern Memory. Nostalgia is interested in energy. She infects each room with longing. She can reduce you to tears in minutes. She can lift up your spirits in seconds. They make a good pair, Memory and Nostalgia, and they know it. They are deeply entangled (who knows where one ends and the other begins?)

Memory approaches me at dawn, carrying a time capsule. A fragment from the past.

“Do you want to know where and who you were exactly a year ago? Do you want to know what you were paying attention to?”

“You mess up dates and locations” I retort. “How can I rely on you?”

But Memory knows I am curious. She doesn’t flinch. She knows I won’t say no to a good story - especially if it is offered by a skilled storyteller.

Nostalgia brings me a cup of coffee. I sit down and wait for her to begin.

When she finishes, I pause for a moment before I ask softly, Can I write about this? Am I allowed to recount this story in my own words, can I fragment it further, is it blasphemous to write about memory from memory?

Memory smirks. Why do you think I’ve reminded you? She disappears without a trace.

Nostalgia, of course, lingers for a moment longer.

---

August 14th, 2022

I’ve been reading Virginia Woolf and Mary Oliver all morning. It’s strange to juxtapose their method of paying attention to the world, to notice the many similarities and differences between the two writers/poets/observers who have shaped my worldview, who have looked into the heart of suffering without walking away.

“I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?” - Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“A lifetime isn’t long enough for the beauty of this world/ and the responsibilities of your life.” - Mary Oliver,

Words are living beings. Poems are alive. I read, I read, I read. I dissolve into these pages. Let me stay here for a little longer before my responsibilities pull me back into the world.

***

My quiet hour is interrupted by the other Airbnb guests, Gaby and her eight-year-old son, Andrew.

Gaby hugs me. Andrew is too shy to meet my eyes. Gaby is curious why I’ve come to Southport in mid-August.

Just to be closer to the sea, I reply. And you?

Just to get away from London, she sighs.

We talk about the exhaustion and thrill of living in big cities, the current cost-of-living crisis, and the struggles of making sense of one’s politics in a world that is increasingly fractured and elusive. We drink Earl Grey tea and eat muesli. She expresses how difficult it has been to raise a child as a single mother, how she had never imagined herself to be living so far away from home and family, how her life looks very different from what she had imagined it to be, how she still feels like a child who is failing and flailing all the time, even though her fortieth birthday is just around the corner.

“There is a lot I wish I could change. But then I think about Andrew and I realise that if I had made different decisions, he wouldn’t be here with me. Andrew keeps my centre intact, he keeps me grounded. I love him so much.”

Andrew blushes, slightly embarrassed by his mother’s unabashed declaration of love.

Love, like nostalgia, has an infectious energy. After breakfast, I text my mum. “I miss you.”

***

Nostalgia, like love, has an infectious, insatiable energy. It fills you up within minutes until you are brimming with emotion.

Last year, on this day, I unexpectedly received a bouquet of sunflowers from A. That small gesture moved me beyond words. For the next couple of weeks, whenever I glanced at the bright yellow flowers sitting in the corner of the living room, I would remind myself how lucky I am to be here. (gestures at everything)

***

Nostalgia often makes you look inward. But sometimes, it helps to pull yourself gently to look outward, to change the perspective.

I look outward, at the vast horizon in front of me, to capture the fullness of this moment for a future self.

Look, you’re here, you’re alive, you’re by the sea, you’re alive, you’re reading Mary Oliver, you’re alive.

Looking outward reminds me of an essay by a Buddhist teacher, who wrote that we must constantly make the leap from the Small Self to the Big Self.

The Small Self is the ego, our layers of conditioning, our habitual ways of thinking. The Big Self is the entire cosmos in motion. It is you and me and the intricate web that connects us all. The Big Self is always evolving, shifting, and transforming.

We can make sense of our wholeness only in relation to each other, and yet how often do I (we) retreat to my (our) Small Self? Lesson: There is no final point or moment of arrival. We have to attempt the leap every single day.

***

Madeleine L'Engle wrote:

“I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be... This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages...the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide... Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I'm with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don't ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child's awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup.”

Every birthday eve makes me wonder about the past selves I have been, forgiven, outgrown, but never buried. The seven-year-old dreamer who wanted to travel the world. The thirteen-year-old teenager who was angry at the world. The seventeen-year-old almost-adult scared of moving away from home. The twenty-two-year-old who is attempting to understand what ‘home’ means in this transient world.

Every birthday eve makes me wonder what my future self would tell my current self. Every birthday eve makes me wonder what lessons I have to learn, what narratives I have to unlearn, what stories I need to remember and which ones are better off being forgotten.

I couldn’t know this then, but many months later, I would receive a handwritten message from a dear friend, sharing some wisdom from Sharon Blackie:

“Unending transformation, the greatest of all the gifts the Earth offers us.”

---

August 14th, 2023.

If I could sail the seas of time to deliver a message to my past self, it would be these five words:

Let yourself be endlessly transformed.