Are there events in your life that play themselves out in your mind over and over again like the needle stuck in a groove on an old vinyl record album? It's been happening a lot to me lately, traumatic and all random, coming from nowhere to haunt my mind.
Myself as a six year old in the backseat of someone's car parked in the driveway of my Aunt's house, my older brother leaning standing in the car window saying we've arrived too late and my grandmother has already passed.
A preteen me laying on my back with headphones one listening to music when my mother came in to say that I wouldn't have to go to school the next day because my grandfather had died.
Years later, in my early twenties in the living room at my Aunt's. The telephone receiver, on a long stretchy cord long before the cordless wonder entered our lives, dropping from numb fingers. I'd expected to hear that my father had died, but instead the ridiculous news that my younger brother was dead.
A phone call in the middle of the night... my uncle, my father really, the one who'd raised me and spoiled me and ruined me for life without his precence... "I think he's really gone, Mar." like there could be some doubt.
Years later, standing on a stranger's doorstep one of life's dramas interupted by another... deliver a message to my son, his Aunt Betty died today.
Then the hardest of all... maybe because it's the most recent... or maybe just because of it's unthinkable nature... the scream that pulls me from sleep with a certainty that something is horribly wrong... "Mom, get up, Aryiana's dead!"
There are happy moments too... the arrival of my first foster child, the adoption ceremonies, picking up my daughter all wrapped in a little blanket, carrying my son to the car knowing that he was finally coming home with me forever after a two year battle of politics and bullshit, the birth of my baby son... many births and weddings... the few hours of closeness I was given with my brother not knowing that it was the last time I would see him alive... Oddly they don't play themselves out nearly as often and usually only when spurred on by some reminder of that time in my life.
Yet somehow the ugly memories that have a way of creeping out of nowhere... for me anyway. Maybe others are different. Do you have moments that replay themselves? Are they the positive memories or the ugly traumatic ones? Do you think there are messages we're supposed to take away from the replays or are they just a reminder that life is too short and passes too quickly?
I've always taken memories that play over and over simply as things that are so important I have to relive them. Stuff that shapes my existence.
ReplyDeleteI have a lot of vivid images. I remember standing in my mom's kitchen after my brother was stabbed and seeing one perfect, thick disc of blood dripped on the white rubber tip of his Converse. But I also remember holding my niece for the very first time and how her eyelashes rested perfectly on her cheek.
(this is from Jessica, by the way, I don't know what's up with the commenting stuff)