Mind Shore

Echoes and edits

neurons sway, synapses play jazz a haphazard symphony in the quiet auditorium of my mind, notes scribbled outside lines nostalgia bends, twists, pirouettes, unrehearsed and unrestrained

footprints on the beach, the tide comes it doesn’t ask, just washes, leaves new spaces for old steps to be reimagined, not as they were but soundly brighter, softer, or perhaps not at all

fragments of the past, like wildflowers in urban cracks unplanned, blooming between steel and stone, color where none was intended, memories morph, stories grow legs, walk into now, sit down for tea, spill over the present

i edit, we all do not with pens or keystrokes but with sighs, with the turning of a head, the half-smile remembering when, adjusting the contrast, tuning up the warmth

let the mind wander, a bird in open skies, soaring through the watercolors of bygone times, twirling amid specters, as real as my skin, no permission needed, no rules, just the sky, bare open

the truth? it’s there, in the bones, even when the flesh of the tale is plump with fancy, sometimes truth needs a little daze to breathe, to be seen, to be felt a story told, a life relived, a moment given wings

memories, not held but holding like water, or maybe the breeze felt, needed, slipping through fingers forming, re-forming, the only constant is the change.

“Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own.”— “Midnight’s Children” by Salman Rushdie.

This poem was inspired by a conversation I had with my Mom last week, about her deceased friend and a fond memory we shared with her. Her version of that memory was so different from mine that we grew quiet for a while, doubting if we had actually been there together, in the same timeline, the same event.

We remember memories in the way we want.

Every time a memory comes back to us, it’s washed away a little, again and again, until what remains is a fragment that only we wish to hold on to.