If you want to listen to this piece, click here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caLex3BT-kc&t=1s
If I were to write to you, which I
won’t.
I would ask you, do you know what
memories are?
Memories are weeds.
When I’m jogging in the morning, I
pass under a wide bridge, grey, and severe looking, robust and rooted between
two diverging roads like the years between us. On my left a busy road, on my
right six feet tall weeds, in the darkness of the tunnel, with no sunlight or
rain they grow, straight and thick, green, and healthy, and unwelcome.
If I were to write to you, which I
won’t. I would stagger at all the things life had put between us, to forget. Season
after season, toppling one another, like domino pieces, everything it takes to
make a vibrant, glowing, colorful spring, collapse into to grayness of a
freezing winter.
Time does not truly pass, time is
like a Merry-Go-Round, if you look closely, if you stop and watch it turn, if
you focus your attention on one spot, no matter how many years pass, your gaze
will return to that same point, that one moment, like the first red autumn
leaf, like an old bruise that darkens, then heals, then remains tender, aching
and throbbing on rainy days, a living breathing thing.
If I were to write to you, which I
won’t, I would ask you, do you know what memories are? They are Seedpods. All
Spring, all summer long the Milkweed grows, an unassuming green plant,
indistinguishable from the riot of plants parading around it. But late in the
summer, early fall, when all the plants are withering away, the Milkweed behaves
differently, it pushes out a lemon shaped pod, a sack, a womb that fattens, and
grows, and inflates, until finally in late fall, it explodes in feathery like
seeds, white parachutes falling and rooting themselves to the earth, clinging
to where they came from, to what they know, to repeat the cycle once more.
Do you now what memories are, I ask
you, in my mind, as I jog the same path every morning, I pass the Milkweed on my
right, then the grey bridge, then the six feet tall weeds growing in the pale
gloom of the sunless tunnel, then back to the milkweed on my left, their
exploding wombs promising another coming, another Spring.
Do you know what memories are? Memories
are Weeds. Even in the shadow, even when unwatered they live, and grow, and come back again, and
come back again, and come back again.
