'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.