#emohits

I wake up to the sound of the alarm Buzzing through my sensitive eardrums I order it to stop, to cut the whining cord The cog and sprocket system of this world starts again Like my grandmother’s grandfather clock Whose pendulum would swing back and forth Over and over until it loses the direction it first started with That’s life, a pendulum reverberating from point A to point B And the distance from A to B, a blur, a swing, a fleeting memory

As I get up from my lopsided bed, I attempt to remember those blurred points in space To retexturize them, polish them, clean them again Clean enough for me to see them for what they once were The clarity of a virgin memory, untarnished by the equivocal nature of time It scares me, oblivion and everything that would go with it And lately I’ve had to go through this constant rehearsal of memories Just to make sure I haven’t forgotten the really important ones you know It’s terrifying shit; it’s like walking through this no-holds-barred minefield That consumes my being with weird feelings like guilt, or sorrow, or solace, Or some unlabeled feeling that strains to be felt with utmost urgency

  As I go through my morning routine I go through the tiny rehearsal for my tiny staged mind I remember exactly four memories with my grandmother before she passed Seeing her for the first time was one of them, seeing her for the last was not But I remember the moments right after, This South American taxi guy taking us to the airport The warm Los Angeles summer sun with it’s striking rays Touching my gray tray of food on board our Northwest Airlines flight I had an ice cream sandwich (3 flavors: Vanilla, Strawberry, and Chocolate Fudge) Here I am eight years later, in bed wondering if I really looked at her enough

  Several years ago, two or three I was madly in love with this girl I remembered all the poems I’d write her, The songs I’d sing to the tune of my untuned guitar The way she walked, the way she dressed, the way she never really stood still The way she held my hand once in a lobby of some place, Not that it meant anything I bet But now that I look back and try to remember how I felt for the sake of it I only feel this empty chasm of space Like running your hands through a filter That prevents you from perceiving the pain of it, the palpability of it As if the atoms and subatomic particles of that space in time Just vanished into thin air  For the sake of making room for a temporary safehouse from the insanity of things Because these creatures hidden in these quantum particles Man, they break you to pieces Until you’re nothing but a shell of who you used to be

  That’s the thing, you can’t choose what you would remember And you can’t choose what you would forget You just do, no matter how painful each memory could be Because it’s as if the human anatomy has this fuse Used to shut down all perceptive functions before the walls of Jericho cave in Yet in the end it’s not the diabolical flood  That haunts me but the unrelenting uncertainty The uncertainty that today would be a memory remembered Or yesterday, or the day before that Or the people I know right now,  The people I’d often force myself to remember every inch of Will they be there in the next uncertain moment? Or would I rewrite them Just like the thousands of characters from my unfinished chapter book? Is life just an MS Word file? Is it just an editable piece of storage space That can be deleted and sent to the constraints of oblivion?