I sit at the keyboard watching my words spill out. In my mind, there is a balloon filled with memories, ideas, warnings and lessons. It is a balloon filled to bursting.
And I am blocked. Blocked by the knowledge that there is no such thing as a reliable memory.
You see, even my thoughts are unreliable. I am as like to be lying to myself as – well – you are.
I believe that many layers of consciousness down, there is a neutral observer. This observer keeps a scorecard of the lies we tell ourselves. We don’t appreciate this spy that lurks within, who at any moment might shout out the most unpleasant truth.
So we lock this spy in a room. Over time, as our fears grow, we add locks to the cell, hide this cell and the spy within deeper and deeper in our soul.
We add guards to the cell, create detours that form a labyrinth that cannot be navigated by anyone, ourselves included.
How can I be trusted? How can I trust myself?
He looks at the words he has written and wonders if he merely alienating the reader. Would he want to read a novel that begins with such pompous negativity?
It is tempting …. just delete and start over. Already he is rewriting in his head. No. The time for editing is far ahead. Time now to begin the journey.
My mother’s father was the gentlest, kindest person I have met. His wife was a cold-hearted bitch. The memories of the child, the memories I have inherited from that child, decorate the walls of my reality. I am not longer comfortable with those memories. The pictures on those walls might be realistic, but the interpretation is up to the viewer, to myself. The problem with pictures is we only see what the painter has chosen to show. We don’t see the garbage wagon lurking behind the exquisite facade of the Cathedral; we don’t see the starving child hidden behind a bush in that formal park. We can imagine these things; we can interpolate these things; but they are phantoms.
My mother’s parents were divorced. They divorced around the time he was treated for testicular cancer and ended up wearing a colostomy bag for the rest of his life. It was a stinky, unwieldly necessity. One had to care for him to ignore that bag in any way.
Was his cancer the reason she divorced him? Mom never shared with me the reasons for the divorce. But she did share with me what followed.
If Rose were at a party and Bill showed up, she would leave. This my mother shared. My aunt confirmed it, so it probably is true.
All I really had to go on were the times I were with either of them. All the times my grandfather smiled at me, gave nothing but love. And the time my grandmother pushed one button so hard that my preteen self was compelled to tell her “go to hell.”
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