Tirza ~ May 12

Were you ever on the Highline? I ask. Yes, wait, I was there with you…

And the memory unfolds that neither one of us had remembered until now.

Memories can be like that, buried. It feels like another lifetime, before the pandemic, before the divorce, before the sale, before the diagnosis, before the cell transplant, before, before.  

We seem to fling the newer events like clothes onto a growing pile of worn clothes, or into an attic for the no-longer-needed-but-just-in-case-someone-will-want-it things. 

Yes we were there with so and so…So and so was with us that day? And more is unveiled about that day. The cool sunshine, the gentle shyness of a new relationship, the wonder as we take in the view. Something new to be shared, something new to be learned about the pace of the walkers, the distance between them, what they notice and fail to notice.

Maybe memories are more like elements in the edifice of a friendship, a relationship, a life journey, that once installed they are just bricks, only words in a longer tale, perhaps a verb but maybe just a preposition.

Not to say all memories are the same:   there are the must-have, can’t-live-without memories, the headlines, the underlines, the standout shiny italics (aka meaning) to our stories.  The columns to the temples of our beliefs, our loves, our disappointments, and our failures.

When you think about it, it’s a mystery why we remember the search for the fabric store more than the walk along the Highline, any memory over any other. Is it a preference for disappointment over gratitude, or vice versa?  

Is it an instantaneous judgment our brain makes – this one fits with our story, this one, meh.  Or is it that it would take too much time and effort to catalog this memory…doesn’t quite fit in the autobiography section, not enough humor, weak on the self-help, forgeddaboutit!

And truth be told, it’s one of the reasons we hold on to old friends. They are sure to remember the same things differently or different things.  They’ll bring up on our screen a day we’d completely forgotten about, when it was sunny and the water was warm or the air was cold, and we said things that show that we haven’t changed at all, or that we really have.  They remind us of the clothes buried in that pile, dust off just what we need from our attic, or take a whack to shatter one of those replastered columns constructed just to hold up the stale story we have been telling ourselves.