Forest of Memories
Now and then, I think about meeting you down a road distant from here. Thousands of miles away.
Our appearance, to the world and to us, would be different. Our corporeal frames would be a little haggard, a natural result of our moderate longevity. Acceptance towards hair loss, consequential of moving to a country with an incorrectly balanced water supply, or eyesight made dim and diaphanous from countless nights spent reading, or perchance a wearied shiver in our hands and fingers from all the tobacco we’ve consumed.
Forever changed we would be. The inaccurate anticipations of expectant youth delivered unto us, or abandoned to a destiny that would have failed us. Our cloud-like hopes and ideals, central pillars to our lives; culture, religion, and our friends strengthened by a blind or insightful resolve; planned through obstinate or pragmatic determination, and achieved using hastened or fastidious actions.
The wants and needs of our impassioned prime attained, perhaps in time morphed into objects drastically different. Our society abandoned under the weight of an inundating strain, our dogma cast into the inflexible past that bore it down upon us, our companions replaced, time and again, at the behest of our now-jaded hearts.
The cinder track sprinted through and completed, to a point. Our ardent desires satiated, our calling found, and the challenges envisioned by us concluded in success or failure. We would carry the scars of our lives on our bodies, scarcely noticing the change undergone over the years, a wrist that carries within it a chronic injury, an effect of repetitive strain, or a cleverly masked tattoo of a lover, once but long past. An allergy to stale air, healed by years spent in the open countryside.
Our day of reunion. We would recall days spent long ago, smile at foolish jokes that made us laugh, and honestly recount our lives, the medals we’ve added to our wall of life, and our list of failed, long-taken, and maybe rectified decisions. A tree with piercing roots that penetrate an earth neither fertile nor barren, floral limbs that branch out into innumerable offshoots, covered in some places with dead or dying bark, and in other areas with the lush green of life, sprouting and spreading.
I think of that day sometimes.
I think of how our skin, all that was once us, would be shed. Our metamorphoses completed several times to a static end, would we retain the reasons which brought us together and tore us apart?
Could we then be?
When all is said and done, hurdles crossed and vacations spent, would we then be?
These thoughts come to me often at night while working late or reading alone. Out of nowhere, I simply seem to find you, trapped in a hidden and well-buried reminiscence. I dig the thought up, rub the dirt off with my hand, and use my sleeve to polish it to a brilliant luster. I hold it up into the sun and admire it. A gleaming reflection that keeps me holding on to it, preserving it. After a while, the gem grows heavier and more cumbersome to bear, and so I set it down, remembering old lessons and hours spent training myself to tread the forest of my memories, reminding myself that it might be best to put it back on the ground and walk on.
I do this, and then, sometimes, I find the same ones again, less polished but evidently been recently looked at.
And every now and then, I find ones that I’d totally forgotten about.
Those in particular bring a smile to my face.
