where do memories go when we die?
Unspooling frame by frame or cut up and separated so that infancy and final days collide, overlap, one a grainy lens obscuring the other.
Snuffed out immediately as the body cools, the skin loses translucency, the muscles freeze and the mind and all it holds, jelly like in ambition and possibility, stills.
Slowly reviewed, colloidal plates held up to the sky to be squinted at for more information, hoping to extract and ring anything from the cloudy image.
Baton raced to a new body, a new being, an emerging soul that will carry moments, precious and mundane, to a future out of our bodily reach.
Gently sifted through by gods seeking any reason for our human fallibility, wondering at the mistakes, seeking moments of joyful goodness.
Milkweed floating against a blue sky, apparitions to be caught in a bird’s beak.
Pinned in scrapbooks, barren of stories, brittle without the teller.
Flotilla of cells.
Scents and sounds. Scratch and sniff. I was here. That day in second grade when I fell into a pile of leaves and my mother taught me about tampons and the 36 hours of labor, screaming under fluorescent lights and the woodchuck emerging from under the garage and the fireflies in July and the salty crispness of falafel and the shock of a needle and the first blush of cold white wine drunk under a linden tree in Provence and the feel of a pretty skirt around my waist and the warm hand of my grandmother on my back and the thump of music in a club and the yellow pencil grasped in my hand and white and and cat and cat and cat and wow.
