Rubber, cracked. Red. Ball of spongy rubber, skin cracked and peeling, crumbly interior exposed. Thin rubbery mold line to pick at with tiny nails. Trailer door. Hand slammed in door. Snow. Sea foam green room, cradle. Creepy with the smell of age. No faces. Nothing else.
That’s it. Time’s a muddle. Time? New place, Gentilly apartments, likely a no-tell motel with day rates. Sitting on walkway, dried brown leaves on gravel drive, hand’s reach. Pick up, crinkle. Snap. Crisp. Tear. Peel the flesh from the veins. Crumble in my hands and grind to fine flakes. Mother’s alarm. What am I doing? Palms chapped and bleeding.
Or was it beach on the right, and water? A lighthouse. A road, trains alongside. White water tower. Missisuburbia in washed out 1960’s postcard tones, even in real life. Grampa’s house. Ornamental structural brick carport. Was this first? I think. Maybe. Yes, it comes back to me now, a conversation with Mom many years hence. We’d stopped there with hopes that Grampa would take me in. Apparently the answer was hell no. More here later, but when? Or did I ever remember this moment at all, only to hear about it later, and then to build a false memory built on the bricks of later memory.
How much of my memory today is memory of times recalled, and how much is just remembering what I think I remembered the last time I remembered something? Even then, don’t I likely remember even less, else I’d maybe also remember the setting in which I remembered? Each new memory of a memory seen as a later generation, each losing resolution like photocopied photographs.
Continue reading “Memory, or remembering memory? Or: Let the screaming commence”
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