I can’t remember anything and what I can I’m not sure I want to

Terror filled and fragile

Liquid of experience uncatchable by my leaky aching flakey mind

The dark pools slowly down behind the curtains of my closed lids; seeping. I sink in the blackness. Every night in order to fall, I imagine myself drowning. Suspended in a tunnel of light among a vast sea of undecipherable quietness.

Calm. Edgeless. I descend.

I do crosswords every day now just like my grandfather, small little boxes with exact questions and exact answers, solvable puzzles and manageable mazes. Simplicity in the black and white, literally and figuratively. He was also an avid swimmer, a man of the sea. He drank too much red wine and spent most of his later days, as I knew him, in a dressing gown. In moments I feel myself morphing into some version of him. I used to think about what it would be like to inherit his memories as he lost them, in certain ways, I think I might have.

金継ぎ : Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery, mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. The cracks and fissures embraced. My thoughts are torn apart methodically and rearranged, I piece memories back together again precariously. The gilded edges glisten.

I tell friends tales of my childhood in smoke filled kitchens; exhilarated, animated, alive. Hot pink cheeks and wine stained lips, we howl in the hilarity of regalement. Only later do I realise that the stories I relive through repetition don’t actually belong to me, but to my sisters, to an old friend or my mother. Told and re-told so often that the lines between their lives and mine blur, the spaces between our bodies collapsing into one. A porous boundary. These moments are not ones of intentional deception but of confused subjectivity, of muddled memories. I absorb their experiences. Distorted recollections where echoed reflections of past are pulled into present.

According to Plato’s theory of recollection, we have innate knowledge, with certain concepts imbued in our souls. In birth these are erased, only to be uncovered in the process of learning - an undoing amnesia. Reclaiming what was once possessed but then lost. Kafka, on the other hand, proposed the opposite. With a prioritisation of non-knowing over knowing, incapacity over capacity, he suggests a recollection of absence.

At least I'm doing something right according to Kafka

memory