Photo: C. Mercado
I can divide my life into small fragments of space and time...
Where often it feels like the gaps are fillers in a film, and
the important bits are the highlights... the small boxes of beauty, truth, lies, pain, absolute joy, jealousies, love, tenderness, deep affection, drama, births and deaths....and so many many more
Different emotions difficult to articulate, but strangely real and true when they happen.
My "compartments" are full... any space left means squeezing the ones that are in it,
Reducing them to smaller pieces.... I often wonder if in doing so they lose a little bit of the importance they used to have?
New memories challenge the old ones: should I keep these,
should I discard those?
Choices.
The options are never easy... Do I really have that vast capacity inside me to store everything?
I want to. I can't. I have to let some go, I have to keep room for new ones.
Spring cleaning. Or they can just gather dust where they are, and hopefully a future will find some use for them. Like the small trinkets I keep from the places I have been, each little one has a story to tell.
The beautifully carved glass perfume bottle from Egypt brings back smells of the Khan-el-Khalily market, the billowing smoke of the hookahs, the short trip to Coptic Cairo, the love and friendship around, with the people I was with....
Dainty lacquer finished coasters from Yangon speak of a life that could have been, but never was and never will be...
The tall, elegant metal candle stick, one of a pair, signified promises, promises that have somehow been broken... of a fire that was to be kept burning but flickered out anyway...
I could go on.
Then there are those freeze frame moments,
captured in the mind without any prejudice,
recorded just because they happened: in black and white, in technicolour and some in sepia.
Each denotes a specificity of that instant, that precious point in a continuing tale....
My life exists in small bits of space and time, and I do not want it any other way.
Choices.
The options are never easy... Do I really have that vast capacity inside me to store everything?
I want to. I can't. I have to let some go, I have to keep room for new ones.
Spring cleaning. Or they can just gather dust where they are, and hopefully a future will find some use for them. Like the small trinkets I keep from the places I have been, each little one has a story to tell.
The beautifully carved glass perfume bottle from Egypt brings back smells of the Khan-el-Khalily market, the billowing smoke of the hookahs, the short trip to Coptic Cairo, the love and friendship around, with the people I was with....
Dainty lacquer finished coasters from Yangon speak of a life that could have been, but never was and never will be...
The tall, elegant metal candle stick, one of a pair, signified promises, promises that have somehow been broken... of a fire that was to be kept burning but flickered out anyway...
I could go on.
Then there are those freeze frame moments,
captured in the mind without any prejudice,
recorded just because they happened: in black and white, in technicolour and some in sepia.
Each denotes a specificity of that instant, that precious point in a continuing tale....
My life exists in small bits of space and time, and I do not want it any other way.
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