I remember plants growing wild like weeds, green and yellow under the late summer sun. My fingers, still smooth and nimble, would dismantle them leaf by leaf. I remember a porch, the wood turned grey with age and weather. Why is it that age turns everything grey? Colour seems now like that loyal dog you never thought would leave you, though of course you know even the best of friends must leave one day. Time seems to steal something from us, a vibrancy that cannot be quantified, until the past that was once so murky becomes so bright in comparison that it eclipses the present. That is why we forget. Not neurons or entropy or a lack of aluminium in the brain, but only because we were so much more alive in the past, and we cannot quite believe we are not still.
Yesterday my son took me to a little park by his apartment, and I suppose we fed the ducks or some such, but I cannot quite recall. I remember the joint of the porch, the way the wood was still brown in a patch protected from the wind. There was a household cat, you could tell by the lustre of its fur, who took to sitting in the shade of the porch when I would come to visit. It had brilliant golden eyes and the blackest fur you can imagine; blacker far than night, which we all know is shot with colours, stars and planets and now the city lights that never seem to die.
Last week my daughter came to visit me, and I called her by an old forgotten name. She laughed and held my fingers in her hand like the bones were brittle, and I made her laugh with stories of my childhood. She thought I didn’t hear her crying in the kitchen as she poured the water for the tea, but I heard. I remembered the sound, have heard it a hundred times before; the quiet tears of a sorrow too great to quantify, and too inevitable to fight. I remember the sound the wind made in the trees, the forest just steps from the door. Overgrown in that magical way that lent mystery rather than fear, an enchanted forest rather than a haunted one, where I would play with the other children and we would make up stories of how are lives would be. I remember those stories better, sometimes, than the truth that followed. How I would be a great adventurer and fight terrible battles in the jungles of an as-yet-undiscovered tropical island; or perhaps I would invent a machine that would stop all wars, and bring our fathers home. I remember those make believe battles that I longed to fight, and bless the forgetting that dulls the pain of the real ones I endured. Remember the red-skinned women I would save and take into my arms, though my loving wife is some days only a shadow, an ache, a missing limb.
I remember that porch, those plants, that cat, those trees, though I cannot tell you the place they were, or why I was there. I remember the sky and the smell of the grass, though there are days I cannot even remember my name.
Image by: Hayley Bouchard
You may have noticed that photographs have begun to appear amidst the other works of art. My contributors schedules are fluctuating, so I’ve decided to bring in a monthly high-light! You may see these names and faces appear more than once, or this might be it. So please check out their websites and see what other projects they’re working on.
This week, meet Hayley! Check out her other work at Little Cat Photography.