recollections.

sometimes memories catch you most unexpectedly. sometimes you go back to get something and stumble and stub your toe on something else entirely that you had forgotten in the darkness. the funny thing about recollections is that even when you gather up everything you can find, you still don't feel whole - you're collecting these parts of you, and when you try to put them altogether, they don't create what you want, even if you're not entirely sure what it is that you want.

memories are our way of aging our lives. when you dehydrate something, you completely change the nature of what you started with. you lose the messy juiciness and vibrance of flavor and are left with something with only enough resemblance of the original product so you vaguely remember what it started as. it's a muted version of when something was alive, pulsing, vibrant.

sometimes i like the aged version of foods - like raisins. i'm not a fan of grapes, but there's a tinge of sadness contained within raisins.

i know i don't like to remember some things just because i miss the messy boldness of what it was to live those moments. i resent the muteness. i resent the lamination of real life to protect it enough to carry it around with me. so i pretend i don't carry those memories - not because they were bad moments necessarily, but because there's a hint of melancholy involved as i also remember what it was like to be alive in those moments. and that's in the best memories.

the thing about recollections is that it's rarely re-collecting anything. it's re-creating, trying to force the life back into something that was left for dead long ago. and there's a part of me that remembers just enough to know that there were these times that filled me so that i could no longer contain it, and i know that every time i write, i am yearning for definition, for precision, but sometimes, the more i write, the clearer it is that the moments have oozed beyond the barriers of any container i thought to put them in, and the more i write, the more sullied they become, the more i re-create rather than re-collect.

i like to think that i fight for truth every day. but what is true is often fiction, or so we're told. so i just tell myself, just as long as it's not false, that's all that matters. maybe facts are never true without a little fiction. and so i busy myself with recollection, trying to mute the emotive responses that accompany my re-creations.