'we tell ourselves stories in order to live.'

-- joan didion, 'the white album'

i've spent the last few days haemorrhaging personal narrative to anyone who would listen. my throat is dry. i'm ordinarily prone to long-windedness, but this is different. when no one is around, it's me lying in the dark, first in my bed in salem and now in the pull-out in dracut, running through the formative stories of my life. where do these memories go? i think forward to a dim day when they simply disappear. i'll be hurt by it, generally rather than specifically, like grasping for the last threads of a fading dream in the early morning. i won't know that i don't remember what alex's house was like on thanksgiving 2006, i'll just know that i vaguely recall the scent of incense and struggle in vain for the rest. gone. a terrible sadness there. the moments i know have no objective existence and will never be immortalised in great fiction. if anything, they're given a short-term lease on life in poorly stylised non-fiction in my many words, but who would ever bother reading them?

it occurred to me that most the moments are transmitted verbally, their meaning shored up in anecdotes imbued with as much humour and flippancy as possible. we want other people to remember so maybe some day they'll remind us. or they'll think of it and have a chuckle if that moment became one of theirs. we tell ourselves stories, yes, but only when there aren't other people around to hear as well. i sense the oncoming death of moments once held dear and bear them as a testament to others that they may live a little longer. it sounds noble that way, but isn't it just selfish? or, rather, is it interesting enough to be the good selfish, the sort of thing catherine would approve of on the grounds that it maintains sanity for a moment-- that's something that can never be discounted, regardless of any greater claims. but maybe i'm getting started on this a little early.

the fountainhead here can be traced back to my last post. alex wrote an article that i and a particular moment that took place between us are mentioned, though i am not named. i'm always anxious about other people's depictions of me because i want to know how much of how i interpret moments and relationships is objectively verifiable. my focus and criteria for inclusion and exclusion in long-term memory differ widely, i imagine, from most other people, and i'm prone to imaginative leaps and connections once further information is gathered after the fact. she did the same thing when writing about it: picked a particular aspect of what had happened, connected it to what had happened beforehand, and looked back on it a year or so later. i assume that's what people do, yet i, like everyone else, have a hard time imagining the thought processes of others. what materials form the breakwaters keeping the lethe-like ocean away from your seaside mechanisms?

i don't have any answers. i don't really have questions, for that matter. what i do have is a knowing dread that my revery is meaningless even to myself if it could never be perpetual. i believe we call this mortality. my memories, pleasant and unpleasant, drive me-- when i tilt too far to one extreme of this state, which is often, i live only in the past. right now i'm seeing the other one, wondering if i can trust the past at all.

figures, the one time i've wanted to talk to you in months and you're not online. i haven't been in a while either. i'm not avoiding anyone, least of all you: you promised you wouldn't contact me unless i contacted you first, and that's kept so far. used to be that i was the one who wanted it that way, but now the roles are probably reversed. i saw what you wrote about me. i'm glad you're not as bitter about it as you were once. it's good to see you branching off, i think, and it's good that you're expanding your horizons and such-- and the second i have these thoughts i feel like a paternalistic bastard up past his limits of ego, as if i'm an element of responsibility and cause in your life. am i? i have a place there, i suppose, but that's all in the past and it isn't going to be what it could have been. ironically, i think you accepted that before i did.

i don't know why i went looking for your name on this particular evening. it may be that i keep telling people the story of how i almost died last thanksgiving or raving about pumpkin bread: it's hard to keep memories so closely related to you separate from your form in my mind. if you're coming home soon i want to see you, if you want to see me. if you won't be home for a while i want to see you then, too. i want to catch up and let the gap in time heal what was wrong with the friendship, if that's possible. and at the same time i'm not sure if that should happen at all. if you read this, don't think i didn't send it because i didn't mean it, because i don't know what i mean. i still have the button, you know.

unexpectedly mild day. woke up early to an aqueous pitter-patter that means a morning shower. leaves on the ground, wet. do not allow yourself thoughts of spring.

what was the last complete thought i had? i looked at my notebook; no help there, wrote down something the other day, just a fragment: 'straining for beauty in each industrial sunset.' i drive the same route every day down canal street. it gets dark at half past four and i see the sunset through the power lines. it's dark too early. year to year we never get used to this.

i turn on the lamp my father bought each evening in the foyer. over the summer i would get home and open up the shades to let some light in, but by the time i get here now there isn't any reason to. it's cold, which makes it hard to think complete thoughts.

the last few days it's been the wrong kind of cold, the first of the two kinds of cold that are hurtful. it isn't the one that physically hurts and overpowers you with its bite. it's the other one, the one that comes earlier-- the cold that promises warmth. the spring cold. if it weren't for the leaves and the month i could swear it's march. i constantly stop myself from thinking thoughts of that time, realising that it would entail living in anticipation of the moment i get to start living in anticipation of spring. i do enough of that in february. it becomes an aesthetic hobby.

it should be the cold that promises more cold, because that's what there is to be sure of. november, december, and the inevitable progression of winter. the dying year's last gasps echoing through the familial warmth of some denominated eves.

the morning after october was pretty damned interesting, wasn't it? so warm when i first stepped outside today, the sky a dull brilliant yellow-gray with the glow of last night's festivities still lingering in the air. the lack of sun gave everything a hue more befitting autumn. work kept me inside for a few hours but before i knew it i was out there again, still impossibly warm with this one-day-only hint of generous november sweetness. and wind. i ran into tina and our conversation was on the verge of bringing up what time of year it is and what that means, but then it was over.

i celebrate the end of october now, yearly, as a new beginning in the most paradoxical of settings. when i got home around half past three the wind was still blustery and yellow leaves swirled around my car as i found a place to park. it gets colder from here on, i'm reminded, and it won't be much longer that i'm followed home by sweet swirling friendly leaves, but a comparison at this point can be made to the mere remnants of storms. in less than a month, a year since blue-glow sky and closing time. the world looks different this time and the whole house is singing in a different key.