walking home

It’s sort of unavoidable to think about violence today. And I sometimes hate the ways in which that word places itself at the forefront of who I am and what I do. There’s no shaking it, though. Sometimes even concepts can work their way into the very seams that hold us together. Ripping them out only serves to tear ourselves into pieces. I can’t afford falling into bits. Especially at my own hands.

Yesterday between 42nd street and here, I tried intently to bring things back. There’s so much of me that’s been lost forever. So many images silenced by repeated trauma to the head. There’s nothing left of my life before about age 14. A demarcation that feels arbitrary at best. Even afterwards there is little left out of which to construct a life. An identity. Disconnected memories that span a few short years. Mostly of me at the end of a fist. Like the requisite period at the end of a sentence. My current capacity for memory also feels diminished. I often forget what I’ve told people shortly thereafter. I suppose I’d make a horrible liar. It makes studying difficult. All of this equals something I don’t admit. I tell stories about my childhood only in the ways they were told to me. From my mother’s voice over the phone. Through picture albums on laps over holiday weekends. The few home movies transferred from Super-8 to the now almost as outdated VHS. They become stories about someone else. Somebody who often looks like me in pictures. Who almost didn’t make it. Sometimes I’m not sure who did.

It’s so important for me to write things down. To describe in words the way something sounds – how an emotion might have played on my senses. I never know when it might disappear. When that moment might forget me altogether. So I play at chasing memory and satisfying the desire for stories. About anyone. Anywhere. I want to fill myself up with your stories to cover those never-ending blank spaces of my own.