The Archive | Collectedmemoriesofj

Today: A Beginning/An End

I start here. You can start where you like.

Some time ago—I often concern myself with how long for some reason—I set out to reimagine my life. Remarkably, this task has been trying. I have found that my life is mostly empty space: the absence experience left and consequently my being is built upon.

There are clear moments scattered throughout my memory, and to these I've grown somewhat attached. I think of these as parts of a sort of internal genealogy, each moment giving birth to the next, and the past becoming a creative, rather than imitative, project of the present. This collection, up to the present, only covers up to about my high school years. Interestingly, I find it isn't the earliest years that are the hardest to recall, but the middle years.

I have collected these here, for my and your viewership, to give my memories a chance at objective interaction: to give my past semi-permanence.

Birth

"It all began with a mistake: conception"

Earliest Memory (About)

"Red and Yellow

Swimming

"The height must be exaggerated in my memory, but I can picture my toes over the edge, floating over the water, and to this day the dread I felt then lingers in that image."

Father's Cubicle

"The only principle here is the kind that gets paid after interest”

My earliest years in education

"Hell is a quiet room where the past dances silhouetted against stucco walls; Heaven is memory foam fit for forgetting"

Written in a journal titled

"Lines"

"Truth always is"

A Spectator

"The world felt beautiful in abstraction, especially when reality started feeling less

available."

"Lines" Continued

“A coffin is cheaper than life’s rent, but sleep is less of a commitment”

Snow Facing

"Something about snow refines silence"

A Friendship

"We had a knack for commiserating"

A Park

"The place seemed expansive, surrounded by grass, trees, and the occasional bench-table"

Baseball

"characterized by anxiety and poor odds"

"Lines" (3)

"Language is an active pursuit in fiction"

"Hearing Hailstones"

"from then on I wanted to write"

A Mausoleum

"haunted by an undeterminable past"

Salt Water

"Few sights are capable of containing so much hidden life"

Love, or the Thought Thereof ("Lines" 4)

"There is nothing to see / Looking upon love"

Migration

"my world is a narrow pound by comparison."

Graduation

"You sit awhile, walk across a stage, receive something to contain a diploma/degree, and then sit back down"

My Mother

"But my image of her, then, retains its lucidity "

"Lines" (5)

"I think it's as honest with itself as it can be. How about you?"