Lara sent me this essay by Richard Brautigan sent to her once by someone she meant a lot to, because she thought I would appreciate it (I did) and this was my reply:
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that's fantastic. I love that richard brautigan.
I've been thinking about that a lot lately. Having meant that much to someone, at some point in time. I guess it's worth it, right? It's so much more true than thinking they never loved you like they should have, when it comes down to it. They did, once. And I guess that's worth all of it.
Time is a tricky thing. In our memories it tries to trick us into thinking it never existed. It tries to flatten our past into a single state of being in order to get us to forget the texture of it.
We tend to think of it happening this one way that we can record and remember for posterity's sake. When in reality, everything in our past occurred a million different ways, in a million different directions.
For example, there are volumes of detailed memories that form my past two years of 'being in love'. However, probably after some time has passed, I will group that novel of a history into a few words: 'painful memory', and a single feeling that does it no justice.
I suppose this is a bleak way of looking at things... but in a lot of ways, memory is a bleak, simplified thing. All the luscious details fall through the cracks and flatten the landscapes of our souls. If you think this is tragic, that's because it is.
On the other hand, it's silly to try to hold on to something that never belonged to you in the first place. Resistance to this sort of thing is like trying to claim ownership of the wind that blows across your face. That moment was never anyone's to keep. It just happened, and it happened to you.
That's why it is important just to love the feel of these moments in time as they slip through your fingers, helplessly, like grains of sand resigning to gravity.
I think it's important to remember that feeling. So that it might help to guide you every time you touch your fingers to something in an effort to connect. I guess that's what the art in our lives is. A beautiful byproduct of some unrelenting compulsion to break down walls so we can see the infinite vastness and infinite minuteness that we are (every one of us) a part of.
It's the kind of thing that gives you a bottomless sense of hope... thinking about all the millions of hands and hearts and memories, constantly intersecting to weave the blanket that keeps us warm and alive in this cold, dark universe.
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