“Blazing across the night sky, like shards of broken stars floating images of you, flickering in the darkened haze of my memory, stirring the warm ashes of longing to see you, in the early morning light, to hear your laughter from the next room, to feel your hand resting on my shoulder to have you here once again.”
This short poem was written in 2005 a year after September 11th by a firefighter I believe and I think it conveys the feeling of loss so well. Wouldn’t you have been able to assume it was about sadness and the loss of something without me having to tell you? I hope so. Similar to what I wrote previously the idea of time has always fascinated me, which is why I keep old photos, recites, any kind of ticket stubs, and loved creating scrap books. You truly only realize how short life is when you experience the loss of something.
Like when you’re sitting on a coach with a pillow by your side and then someone asks you for it and once you hand it over you instantly feel the loss, the space the pillow leaves behind. You then have to readjust so your side isn’t exposed because of the missing pillow. That’s the way death and the loss of anything really. We all grow to be so accustomed to having certain things and people in life that once they are gone we finally realize how important they truly were to begin with.
Being able to look back at photos, home videos, old letters and old perfume you wore one summer, is just an instant form of memory traveling that makes the past seems a little bit closer. I wish I would have saved old perfume bottles because I find that smell is the most effective way to "time travel." In a world where everything is so impersonal, were love letters have turned into cold emails that eventually become erased because your email is over flowing with myspace updates. It’s nice to be able to hold onto something human, something tangible to remind us all that yes, time has passed.
-Angela
P.S. The picture at the top is actually a beautiful old card that was given to me by one of the loveliest women I have ever meet. She used to call me Miss. Angela Garcia and wrote to me about her travels and her life experiences. This specific letter was about how she meet her husband for the first time. It was beautiful.
"When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered· the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls· bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory" -Marcel Proust "The Remembrance of Things Past"(1)
ReplyDeletei understand what you're saying. i too love saving things, even if it means hiding it from my mom who likes to throw away things of which she thinks have no more use. I would love to save smells in a bottle forever, like a "smell of memory." i still have a bottle of perfume that someone gave me as a gift for my 6th grd. graduation. whenever i see the bottle or smell it, it reminds me of that time. i still have old letters and gifts, i have even saved simple things like buttons. I guess you can say i'm a "pack rat" :P . i love this blog. ;)
I usually only save a few trinkets--my favorite pictures, favorite letters, all of which probably adds up to a shoebox full of stuff that I keep from the past--but I do enjoy collecting quotes. I write them down and cram them in my drawer, I put them on profile pages and on blogs, on word documents, etc. Same with books and songs. Books and quotes and songs hold memories for me. I remember where I read a book (I read "White Fang" while driving through snowy Montana, "Eragon" while in Florida...etc) and that book holds those memories. I guess words and music are my trinkets, even though it drives me nuts when Mom says, "Don't you want this in your room? How about this? Why not save this?" Lol I guess everyone has a memory storage bin, it just differs from person to person.
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