my undergraduate degree is over
exams are, at last, over. no obligations. I am still adjusting to days that unfurl like blank parchment. Every morning opens with a groggy hand peeling aside the corner of the curtain to inspect the summer offerings. More and more often, I'm met with startlingly blue sky, and that makes me happy. I wonder when the restlessness hits.
The past has been catching up with me recently, and all of a sudden. Messages, calls from people I haven't heard for in years; old surgings, the mossy bones in the closet rattling gently. Everything about the past mystifies. Memory most of all. The other day, an exact sequence of events - walking around a street corner, turning my head to catch a certain smell of old wood, a newspaper sheet drifting to the ground as I stopped - requisitioned, in my mind, a memory of a girl I haven't thought of in nearly ten years. Certain textures evoke too: the way brick feels under my fingertips transports me back to my year in Australia, as does the smell of new paint and sun that glints through treetops in a certain way. An album I listened to avidly throughout my two years of art class is now welded to a vision of colour lashed across paper in thick luminous streaks of paint. Sometimes I shake my head thickly, trying to pin down conversations, melodies, an elusive poem that refuses to be named or ascribed to an author, but which held that one line that captures this moment perfectly, honest, if only I could remember it. I remember the specific way someone lifted her fingers from the table - but not the girl, the table, the place or the time. I perhaps remember love most keenly, and even then, only most when it hurt.
I remember some days, some luminous moments, better than some whole years of my life. How do we live like this? but then, how could we not? Total memory might annihilate us; if not from sheer volume, then from grief, remorse, blind exuberance. A past that clamours for the attention of the present will leave no room for the future. And so we must tolerate the occasional night when we are jerked back from the cusp of sleep by a memory whose turn it is to assert itself in your mind: I happened, and you are the way you are because I did. Such moments are necessary; they are the constitution of your existence, and, acknowledged wisely, the justifications and the greatest lessons, too.