I wake up to the sound of the alarm
Buzzing through my sensitive eardrums
I order it to stop, to cut the whining cord
The cog and sprocket system of this world starts again
Like my grandmother’s grandfather clock
Whose pendulum would swing back and forth
Over and over until it loses the direction it first started with
That’s life, a pendulum reverberating from point A to point B
And the distance from A to B, a blur, a swing, a fleeting memory
As I get up from my lopsided bed,
I attempt to remember those blurred points in space
To retexturize them, polish them, clean them again
Clean enough for me to see them for what they once were
The clarity of a virgin memory, untarnished by the equivocal nature of time
It scares me, oblivion and everything that would go with it
And lately I’ve had to go through this constant rehearsal of memories
Just to make sure I haven’t forgotten the really important ones you know
It’s terrifying shit; it’s like walking through this no-holds-barred minefield
That consumes my being with weird feelings like guilt, or sorrow, or solace,
Or some unlabeled feeling that strains to be felt with utmost urgency
As I go through my morning routine
I go through the tiny rehearsal for my tiny staged mind
I remember exactly four memories with my grandmother before she passed
Seeing her for the first time was one of them, seeing her for the last was not
But I remember the moments right after,
This South American taxi guy taking us to the airport
The warm Los Angeles summer sun with it’s striking rays
Touching my gray tray of food on board our Northwest Airlines flight
I had an ice cream sandwich (3 flavors: Vanilla, Strawberry, and Chocolate Fudge)
Here I am eight years later, in bed wondering if I really looked at her enough
Several years ago, two or three
I was madly in love with this girl
I remembered all the poems I’d write her,
The songs I’d sing to the tune of my untuned guitar
The way she walked, the way she dressed, the way she never really stood still
The way she held my hand once in a lobby of some place,
Not that it meant anything I bet
But now that I look back and try to remember how I felt for the sake of it
I only feel this empty chasm of space
Like running your hands through a filter
That prevents you from perceiving the pain of it, the palpability of it
As if the atoms and subatomic particles of that space in time
Just vanished into thin air
For the sake of making room for a temporary safehouse from the insanity of things
Because these creatures hidden in these quantum particles
Man, they break you to pieces
Until you’re nothing but a shell of who you used to be
That’s the thing, you can’t choose what you would remember
And you can’t choose what you would forget
You just do, no matter how painful each memory could be
Because it’s as if the human anatomy has this fuse
Used to shut down all perceptive functions before the walls of Jericho cave in
Yet in the end it’s not the diabolical flood
That haunts me but the unrelenting uncertainty
The uncertainty that today would be a memory remembered
Or yesterday, or the day before that
Or the people I know right now,
The people I’d often force myself to remember every inch of
Will they be there in the next uncertain moment?
Or would I rewrite them
Just like the thousands of characters from my unfinished chapter book?
Is life just an MS Word file?
Is it just an editable piece of storage space
That can be deleted and sent to the constraints of oblivion?
Back in TLE class, I remember learning one thing
Pickling green mangoes into these glass mason jars to last until who knows when
In retrospect, I wonder if the nature of preserving a memory
Is somewhat like preserving a perishable good
And stuffing it forcefully into a fragile glass jar
©THEGOSPELOFGINNY