space, memory, time

the art and the shadows from the glass windows

A few weeks ago you went to a concert you’ve been to before. It turns out if you revisit the same space with the same sound in the same month three years in a row, you’ll be reminded of just how much has changed. You wore a long sleeve shirt even though you knew you’d overheat by the third song, just like the years before, and while undressing in the crowd you thought about how your style has evolved with time.

Throughout the set you felt deep joy, grief, pride, confusion, and hope, and above all gratitude for feeling all of it as intensely as you do. You saw a past version of yourself in the girl who was seeing the band for the first time with a boy she liked, and you smiled knowing your life is more expansive because you were once her. You heard the familiar lyrics, you’re afraid of what you need, and you know it, and this year you did not cry when you sang them aloud.

When the music ended you went to the bathroom to document in the notes app of your phone what arose. What needed to be recollected wasn’t totally apparent– was it the memories from tonight or the memories of a time before that resurfaced tonight or the newly formed relationship to the memories of both? You’ll deal with that later.

And later you did what you typically do– recorded voice notes to yourself on the walk home, rewatched the few videos you took in place of mid-set words, journaled in the style of your handwriting that evidences it was written horizontally and under candlelight moments before falling asleep. You’re never sure if these markers of time are out of a love for art or a worry for forgetting, but you know now it does not matter. For at the root of both is a deep admiration for life and its fleetingness, something surely worth remembering.

The calendar ends and begins and, like clockwork, you are coming home to yourself. It’s as if the temperatures drop and give permission for your walls to follow suit, even as you spend more time within them. For the first time in a long time, the walls that enclose you are yours. Your ever-evolving definition of home gains an address and in the process, outdated parts you clench so tightly onto must be modified. When previous spaces are shed the memories they held are not permanently erased, and you are grateful for the versions archived. You make your wifi password something that reminds you of your childhood home from 2009-2020, which prompts memories of the woman at the center of it.

In this new home the walls are as tall as they are bare, a state they will remain until a promise you made to fill them with art of your own is fulfilled. Underdressed and pale to match, you spend much of your time lying on the dark bamboo floors that connect them, a pose you learned to love in the last place you called home. The fall of tangerine skies triggers the the illumination of lamp bulbs in the same hue, and each time you are somehow surprised by the familiar late afternoon greeting. Oh, you’re early. You love when the sun sets at 4:44 because of this.

The windows in this space are expansive and form a glass wall that hardly insulates but saliently isolates you from everything outside of it. Across the way you observe the array of identical glass boxes inhabited by unique neighbors, and in a state of sonder as much as curiosity, you consider the stories and memories that their spaces hold.

It’s sweet and nostalgic, the way he with the large balcony cooks for his wife. They seem happy together. One unit up: she likes to dance with her dog, his fluffy hind legs pandering to a taste in music inaudible through the distance. Jazz, maybe. Two up, one to the right, yes, him wearing the bowtie before the tripod– it’d rock if he gets the part he’s auditioning for. And him, far right, shirtless and covered in tattoos working late into the night– would his colleagues be surprised to know the stories his bare body tells?

Do they think about you, in the space you’re designing to feel like home? What do they see when you dance to disco and get dressed up to stay in and sprawl out to paint, when you cry into the notebook on your writer’s desk that sits close to the window? When you boil pasta water for one for the second time that week, when you laugh into a phone screen they cannot see on facetime with your best friend, when you disappear with candles into the bath until the glass they look through is too foggy for further interpretation. Surely, they know when the same lamp bulbs turn red, the witch comes alive.

You care less what people think about you than you once did. These facts must be tied, in some way– the way your words are kinder and much gentler than they used to be and that you share almost all of them with friends and strangers alike. Of them, this year you admitted you’re fairly terrified of a life cut short because of a lesson you learned unfairly early. It’s a fear infused in the ways you think about health, exploration, purpose, love, memory and time. People like to say that time is our friend when we move through pain. But if it’s time that lessens the burden of grief, you admit it’s also time you’ve been resisting in order to hold onto what you feel you must keep.

Because when we lose something we weren’t yet ready to, the pace of time seems to become inconsistent, backwards even. Immediate, then painfully slow until it feels so incredulously fast that you can’t believe nor locate where it’s gone, so you spend paceless and precious time trying to find it by looking backwards where it no longer resides. You think about that quote from Intermezzo that completed the book for you:

The event is over, the event has been overcome, and yet the loss is only beginning. Every day, it grows deeper, more and more is forgotten, less and less really known for certain. And nothing will ever bring his father back from the realm of memory in the reassuringly concrete world of material fact, tangible and specific fact: and how, how is it possible to accept this, or even to understand what it means?

You’ve learned that some instances of memory are the result of intentionally braved fears, of revisiting familiar places and faces with the feeling of what might resurface and choosing to embark, still. It is why you continue to buy sunflowers and think of her, tulips him. But other times, our memories appear quietly and unexpectedly, out of the blue and into the mosaic of what once was. Soft reminders carrying heavy cargo, there is beauty in that which we do not seek but that finds us regardless.

Like this winter, when you felt your mom’s energy viscerally in a space you had no part in designing. You could not decipher if it was her absence or her presence that was more palpable, she was equally as much in the room as she was not. Decades of history and love interwoven with her spirit seeped without volume into the vastness of a ballroom and it felt like a gift you didn’t deserve.

You reflected on friendship and how most of the highlights of the previous year were made with people you love and label in this category. Of the many learnings, your favorite is that friendship is the ricochet of outbound energy, a boomerang of love intended for someone else but returned to sender.

Ivory rays of sun so bright they must have absorbed the pigment of the sky’s missing clouds on her wedding day, and when you pointed out that it was a perfect day to get married, A said it was your mom’s doing. Supporting A through the emotional heat of a week in the desert, a camp you’re more experienced in than she, and in return the gift of a sense of leadership that you hadn’t felt in years. It hasn’t left since. Genuine wishes sent to J on his birthday followed by the thoughtfulness of his reply followed by tears and your response: you’re not supposed to make me feel this special on your day, but I am glad you did.

This summer in Bali you met a future version of you in the depths of a yoga class and again in the silence of a meditation retreat. She was confident and brave and maternal and you felt like her. She emerged lightly with and in love, and said you will have it all. You believed her. In Lombok you met the seven-year old you in spaces you’ve never seen but she had no hesitation exploring as if she’d been before. She was timid but bold, sensitivity and vibrancy running through her slender bones. You wore her curls and were moved by her thirst for adventure and tendency for tears all month. Each of these versions felt brighter than the current one of you, but you didn’t mind. You felt alive knowing you were and are becoming her.

The rest of your prose on summer hidden away. A tale so deeply lived and felt and documented in poetry and photography and scars, yet a half year later, the words no longer seem to tell the truth. Sad to imagine, you think, the reminiscence of people and places from our past being untrue.

But they are, they were. You were there.

You found peace when you realized that your memories are not untrue, in fact they are the opposite: memory is the recital of what was once real. But equally true is that your present relationship to those moments has changed even when the moments themselves haven’t. Time warps when you spend too much time reliving the memories through the version you were when the memories were made instead of through who you are now. Time. Immediate, painfully slow, incredulously fast. Reading history written by others does not elicit this much tension within you, and so you make a commitment to be honest and expressive about previous parts of yourself and people in your life that no longer are while, at the same time, living as often and attentively in the present as you humanly can.

Your role on earth is to be a translator of the beauty around you, you wrote last year. Memories are portals into stories lived only the way we have, stories worth telling in meticulous detail and vibrant color, and so you will continue to share them, loudly. Because anything we experience that once felt like love is not worth hiding, let alone trying to forget. And as it turns out anyways, the body doesn’t. Anniversaries, seasons, flowers, spaces, the people who buffer the last version of them you knew intimately and the version you were then and the version of you now. If what is meant for us will find us all the same, may as well do what we love in the process.