Heart Out of Body

When I write:

I place myself in the exact moment I’m writing about. I must summon up the situation, the character, the food, the dress, the custom the transport … think of the detail we amass with a breath.

I have lived or am living simultaneously in many diverse places. Having a rich reading history has fleshed out experiences I may have only thought about, if all they say about thoughts being fleshed out in reality.

It is interesting that my handwriting is indecipherable to so many (well, all). I myself cannot read items writ in haste & when writing, I usually am hurrying – a quick list thing – a captured thought which needs a couple of words to be made into a poem or maybe a chapter.

This morning, I found a slim paper with a name, a phone number, a cryptic “Call her if”

There are times “senior memory” is annoying but most of the time I can’t say much – the hole appeared & the info fell into it & I put something else on top of it. That’s how I see it.

To get to a memory, I sometimes move a lot of boxes. It’s always worth it. It’s worth having a memory. Keeping the memory useful by positioning it in the Present is a concept seeming outside of my time & comprehension. The present becomes almost elusively slippery when I try to recall a name I learned only moments before. I rely on writing it all down. With “In-the-moment” memory, problems rise when there’s so much interesting stuff is in the boxes as I look for it.

(The slip of paper was from a lady making a drawing entry who got her ticket later.)

Maybe this is what is happening with my taste & smell. Maybe I am tasting a memory & passing it off as the now. Maybe I am being detached from my senses for some cosmically spiritual reason I’ll discover when I get to it later in life. Or maybe I have to be out of that to understand it. Everything lately is cryptic.

I have more memories now than present recall. This is what they say happens to all in age; childhood resurfaces. Thing is, now there is wherewithal to indulge in those dreams. Not me, I maintain, but that wish for a Radio Flyer red wagon may have translated into, “I wish I had a canvas side folding wagon to carry all the…”

My heart is still in this moment. (Heart is the seat of long-term memory.) My heart is taking note of more going on around us, asserting itself. I guess it’s becoming more of a muscle now, in some growth phase like the rest of me. This growing is so different from any I’ve done before: perhaps it’s no wonder I am so different from who I was. If memory is selective – this box, not that – then no one can say how many slips of paper there are without elaboration or translation or relation.

Since I can’t hardly get to them without moving a bunch of stuff, I’ll just write more.