Memories. They build golden mountains out of dust.
“YOU SELL-OUT!” I scream at my reflection. Regret is a weapon that shreds perspective to pieces. You can be honest and all your actions may be motivated by hope, but regret mutilates goodness until the only hope left is for a better past. We’re addicted to breathing in that exhale of yesterday. The obsession with scene recall. But life is not a movie to rewind. I know this. Still. I can’t stop remembering:
Those heavy black curtains, black bed frame, black sheets.
Being shoved into some dark corner of desire.
The shocking tug inside my chest as we laid together on my Italian twin bed.
A country song, loud, down a country road, the windows low and a friend in each seat. Eating the juiciest plum in the port of Antibes.
The first time a boy called me ugly.
Every time after that someone called me beautiful, or yelled nice ass! from a car window, and never believing any of it, resenting it for years, until one day when I stopped resenting it, started experiencing a gory revelry in it, holding that delicious attention between my thighs and squeezing...
Memories. They build golden mountains out of dust, and monsters of the most apathetic moments. But we like it that way. It amplifies the pain and pleasure. We cannot face a history that holds no coherence, no intention, just the chaos of random choice and event on a scattered timeline of existing. How did we arrive here in the first place? Maybe somewhere inside we know the answer, and we’re terrified of that forbidden knowledge. The only option is to scramble along for purpose every single day, overturning rubble in this crumbled city of expectation. Building little shapes and feelings from the leftovers. Sharing secrets through broken windows, shouting save me into dark bedrooms, scratching ghost-saviors into bricks to resurrect what has been long dead.
It is ignorance.
The truth is, I’m a sell-out because I keep crawling back to the same burning need that struck me down in the first place. This is madness! I want the same thing, over and over and over again, no matter the type of face or shade of landscape. This is a dangerous void that must be sewn shut before too many guts come spilling out. Today the thing has brown hair and red pants. Tomorrow the thing will be an overseas work visa. A medieval city. Tapas. Prosecco. Corinth. A ferry ride and a ferris-wheel piazza. Irish pub crawls and Glasgow slang.
I cannot say how many visions I will use as a return to the same old need, how many times I will ignore the insanity of that compulsion, but I can say it will eventually kill me.