Memories

Good memories are fragile things. It’s difficult to remember joy felt years past, even if we remember the experience that produced it. A keepsake, photo, or conversation may help us recall all what we did at a birthday party or the time we went to a local fair, but, as we grow older, it becomes ever more difficult to reconnect with the feelings we had in those precious hours.

It’s far easier to remember pain. Suffering marks us — scarifies us in ugly patterns about our spirits. We take all of our bad experiences on our backs like a turtle’s shell made of the heaviest stone, crooking our spines with the years. All the while, we trail everything good about our lives on the ground beneath our feet.

Before long, the path leading back to the day of our birth is measured, not by footprints in soft soil or sand, but in loss. A kiss. Laughter over dinner. Swing-sets and the smell of grass. Desperately, we cling to them until the weight of despair shifts on our shoulders, threatening to take us off our feet. They fall from crinkled fingers. We secure our load and continue ever onward.

Those we revile, we may hate without end; people we cherish pass away never knowing they were loved at all. We leave our love behind only to replace it with the pain of their deaths and, finally, sink into the dirt forever.