I Don’t Remember

And now to cap off a night whose productivity was so low it cannot even be measured, I leave you with some writings I did over break with my Mom and some of her friends.

“I Don’t Remember” 3/20/06
How many times have those words passed from my lips? I don’t remember exactly, surely thousands. My Kimberly reassured me, told me not to worry, that she’d remember for me. The hours she spent copying, transcribing each word — well, most words… leaving out the worst, and the best — each day of those early days, each moment, each throb of the heart as it sputtered to life, the fumes of yesterday still pungent, unburned, waiting to explode in a new direction. I lay on my thin mattress, the knotted boards below pressing up through the foam, my sweetheart’s three latest letters in hand. I’d open one, read it through, drink in every word no matter how it made me hurt, or sigh — wince or blush. Give away emotion under that veneer of everything’s bueno. Todo bien. Each letter holding an entry from her journal. Her place of venting, rushing, bubbling, open and closeness. Her memories open to me — flowing across the thousand miles between us. The thousand miles between today and those days only months, years ago when it all began. “I don’t remember,” I could no longer speak those words. She had given me hers. My own memories now sketches where they had been only white-blackness, a swirling soup of places, words, memes… blended and blurred and fused into a chaotic oblivion.