It's not like sand.
More morose meanderings
Have you ever tried to grab a handful of rice? I keep a bucket of sushi rice in my kitchen, and sometimes I like to plunge my hand into it. I reach in, and I try to grab a handful, and when I pull out my hand, I always manage to hang onto some rice, but it is a poor substitute for what I lose on the way.
I’ve been talking about my memory with my therapist recently. She seems to think it’s… not totally normal how little I remember. I mean, she didn’t say exactly that, she’s a therapist, but this is what I intimated. I forget a lot of things: a meaningful experience that my friend says we shared, the first time I met Noah, my high school, or even college, graduation.
I feel bad about forgetting those things, I wish that I could remember the time that Noah and I watched the West Wing on our couch with John, to make him feel better, but I don’t. This was so important to John that he brought it up to us, wanted to thank us, and I had no idea it ever happened. The memories that I most want to have, the loss that grieves me most is that I forget so many things, normal things and important things, that I did with my dad.
This is what leads me to the rice. I have a ten pound bag of the stuff tucked away, more rice than I could ever count. And reaching into this bucket is like trying to pull to the surface memories I think that I should have. I pull out my hand, desperately trying to hold on to something, and, yes, like with the bucket of rice, maybe I wind up with a scant quarter cup, and sure, a quarter cup is technically a full serving of rice, but it could only be enough for someone who doesn’t know how much more there is, who doesn’t have the option of more. Why would you want a quarter cup when you feel the rest slipping past you on your way to the surface? If you were starving, a quarter cup might keep you alive, but it will never satiate you.
There’s some metaphor or cliche or whatever that I forget that says that memories are in some way like sand (this would probably read better if I remembered what it was, but, well, you get the idea) but that hasn’t been my experience. For me, memories are not like sand, they have a bit more weight, a bit more substance.
This is where I’d say “and here’s a rice dish” to share with you, but I don’t have a rice dish to share with you. In fact, I have no recipes to share with you. Recently I have been so depressed that even cooking does not make me feel better, so wretched that my usual distraction of thinking about food cannot interest me. I don’t even want to eat as much as usual, which is… different. So I’ve cooked nothing that excites me lately, and I have nothing good to share.
Full disclosure, I wrote this in July, right before I stopped writing the newsletter altogether (wonder why) but I have been feeling this again, very much, and so I thought it was time to hit publish on this one. I can’t wait until I’m less depressed and cooking and eating is joyful again. I miss the outside. I miss it all. I want a timeline, and I can’t have one. I want to look forward to sitting next to my friend and watching Poirot on her couch, and I cannot, because thinking about it now reminds me of what I cannot have.
I want to be able to remember the times we had together, but as I’ve said, my memory is crap.
I was talking with some friends a few months ago about the notion of visualization, something that I had always thought was a metaphor, but which Noah informed me is something he literally does. I cannot close my eyes and remember what you look like. It is as though I am seeing you through a veil, and every time I try to lift the veil, you vanish. This is how it has always been for me. I cannot visualize us sitting together in the sun, or walking towards the Bergen G stop in the cold after getting out of a movie at UA Court Street. I know that these things happened, and I could describe to you what it felt like, and what I might have worn, but I cannot imagine us together again. I tell myself that I know it will happen. That this will end.
Anyway, Passover just ended, and as a line in our haggadah says “today we are free, while freedom tomorrow is no guarantee.” But perhaps this year I will choose to see it as “today we are apart, while separation tomorrow is no guarantee.”