I can't move forward I can't go back.
It’s like I’ve lost my tenuous grasp on you and you’ve drifted away, into the current of time. Memory stands here, frozen, watching you drift away, dying a new smaller death every day.
Every moment for the last 30 years is recorded and stored. But the medium, while well-cataloged, is imperfect tending toward decay over time. I try to regularly restore the damaged, erased and lost images.
Sometimes there are memories that I don’t want and blot out those, but find that they are particularly indelible, able to reconstruct themselves.
Usually the painful ones.
Each time I reconstruct some favored moment, slight distortions occur, bastardizing the memory. The most devastating of these events is when I intentionally attempt to eliminate some then out of panic or guilt and then try to bring it back. Like Frankenstein’s monster, the form may be there, but in substance, it is wanting.
A cruel and ironic master is time. It is usually the smallest, quietest moments that mean the most, and are those most easily forgotten. Only later, when by unexpected happenstance we are able to recall one or more of these gems, our hearts are broken as we suddenly realize how quickly we dismissed these precious events.
That is why i always come back to those i love. Even though time and space separate us like a vast sea, I build my ship and learn through trial error to navigate those waters: so that I can recreate those happinesses and possibly discover other loves that were tossed thoughtlessly aside.
Usually, though, it is my own memory that betrays me. Those delicious relics are not found only old wounds that had healed and are suddenly reopened only so that I can begin to mend again.
I have learned a valuable lesson in my journey through life however: that the moment of ecstasy or devastation is only ever enhanced and intensified in both anticipation and memory.
These two lenses, looking forward and looking back are a form of organic virtual reality where I can experiment and fantasize without repercussion. Will and warrant have no bearing in the closet of the mind. Or the universe of the imagined.
#artofmiggy #sketchbook #sketchbook61 #portraiture #pencil #memoryisamemory