memory

Someone commented on this photo: "now then,thats how you look happy...nice smile too." This photo was taken in my last year of college. I was happy, more or less. I rarely smile in photographs, and when I do I feel I look hideous.

I am obsessed with memory. I think that some people regard this as weakness. My friend BQ, I suspect, thinks of this memory-obsession as a handicap, and I detect a kind of scorn from him, which saddens me but which I accept. Or maybe it is merely a reflection of my ambivalence to my own memory-obsession. But all artists must be memory-obsessed. It is the reason why so many writers alienate their families and friends; an artist must portray the fun-house mirror of memory truly, or else he or she is lying.

When I was sitting in the early morning quiet today, drinking my coffee (Y. came over last night after working late and was still fast asleep) I had this realization. I wish my mother were still alive sometimes, but I have happy memories, and I am not sad when I think of her, only sad that she is not here. This is because I mourned her properly. It took years, and for much of that time it was almost too painful to even think about her. But I have never mourned the death of my family. I am still stuck in the anger/rage/disbelief of it all. So the next step is to mourn properly. I am sorry if this sounds so full of pop psychology, but I believe it is true. So I dedicate myself to mourning my own childhood with its awful unhealed fractures, with the horrible loss when it all fell apart. I must understand that my family did truly die. This is not to diminish my brother and sister and the importance they have in my life. But the family of my early childhood, the thing that brings to one a sense of security, died.