Most memories of my childhood are watermarked. It’s a weird sensation to describe but it’s almost as if I can view them in waves, like the scent of nostalgia will wash over me and I can feel them in the depth of my core, I can almost taste the time itself for a brief moment. But just as quickly they will evaporate into the cool air and I’m left with the feeling of doubt that they even existed at all. But they’re stored somewhere. I can sometimes see the faded images of them in the background of my mind. Forever watermarked but forever faded behind the bigger picture of continuing.
The separation from the self and the experience of time is one I seldom dreamed possible, but is that not what childhood is?
Or was?
…
Being in the moment of the mud. Not thinking so much as doing with the mud. Stomping mud. Building mud. Empathizing mud. Wading through puddles and rolling down hills. Watching sticks float and singing off note.
Stuck.
Stuck in a mode of change now.
Feeling the mud…
The days begin to fall into one another like dominos and soon enough you’re scrambling to pick up the pieces. To start again. But you can’t get days back. That’s one thing I’ve learned in this realm. See most folks think that you can will them back into existence through the magic of conversation. Suppose that stories themselves can be time capsules in a sense. And while it’s not foolhardy for one to go thinking such things, in the end the time slips by unscathed as it always has, and the new stories begin to take their form in the place where the old once held true.
Replacement stories. That’s something I’ve been working on. What to tell ourselves of this life we never knew if not for the scattered notepads scribbled with thoughts, manias, and matters of the day?
What did this one have to tell us? Anything of value to add to the storyline?
And what to say of oral history?
What to say of the stories that slip through time as sightlessly as the time itself must slip through the fabric of our existence? An arm through a sleeve, a button through a loose hole. Unveiling the naked truth that we must have known all along.
We are time.
We are it's visual cues.
For what else but our own development and aging brains can show us the unrelenting passage of time? And what else does time have to work with but the raw organic matter that brings shape to our world?
The mud.
The stories circle back around to a point where they've been before, but now travelling in a new trajectory, curving so that they almost miss the spot of origin, grazing by it just enough to bounce again like a pinball. An infinite spiral wavelength moving in slow motion…