Porous Time

Warning:  Some of this post may be triggering if you suffer from ptsd.  Proceed with caution, please, and take good care of yourself.

"Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one now another photograph of the same person" ~ Marcel Proust

I always live in a world populated by memories, fragmented and unpredictable.  There was so much violence in my early life that there are very few full memories available to me.  I remember blood or pain--the worst parts, but not how events began nor ended.  Even the terrible memories are sparse.  When I was around 13, I was reading Sigmund Freud (always an ambitious reader, here) and I recall that I discovered the concept of repressed memory.  Not being a very sophisticated thinker and wading in water a bit above my head, I believed that if I just maybe prayed hard enough, I'd find a way to forget everything that had happened to me.  I think I conceptualized it as a tabula rasa event, liberating from the past and the present. 

Lately time has seemed more porous than usual.  They're not flashbacks in the way that one would normally think of them.  I'm not suddenly standing (figuratively speaking) in some horrific moment from the past.  Light has always been very meaningful to me, opening doors to former times.  I can't always recall where the memory of light is located.  For instance, there are times when I'm in the bathroom and light from the window recalls for me a moment of terror.  Which moment of terror is difficult to discern.  Not that I necessarily wish to. of course.

The memories that have been materializing these days are things like a vision of my mom taking something out of the oven.  Or a random day at school (but not one of the heart wrenching ones). Like all of my memories, they're only snippets, disconnected from the flow of events.  They're like tiny photographs arising and falling away.

I don't actually believe in the concepts of past, present and future.  I mean, they exist for us; they're human-created ideas.  In the universe of eternity, time means nothing.  All moments are the present moment.  There's some comfort in that.  I have never lost anyone.  Though they may have died, the times we were together are still alive and animated.  It's easy to talk to the girl I used to be because she's still here.  Quantum physics reinforce my view of time and space.  

I don't know why there's been this shift in memories.  I suppose it's a good thing, in that not all of the memories are bad ones.  Some of them are very tender.  I consider myself blessed to revisit those moments. 

America held hostage day 1652

Bushism of the day:

"I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe — I believe what I believe is right." —Rome, Italy, July 22, 2001