o. ad lib

Memory is strange. We depend, by necessity, on the most imprecise of cameras to preserve life, as though pressed by the mind between silver plates, and speak its course back to us. But each pressing deforms all images. By weeks or by hours, as we sift through the strange cache of recollection, edges ripple and warp. Or light leaks through; it blots whole pieces, integral parts, so that, in their places, we find only emptiness. Fragments of life are lost for good. At each fissure, the head begins to ache from the impossibility of reconciling some true story of the self when so much of it has been scoured away. We are left to improvise.

Small pablum, we take the mottled past and push our fingers into each of the life holes punched by memory. We soothe ourselves with every gap filled by our own invention and reshape our hearts for innocence or intelligence or otherwise, absence, as the situation calls. Imagine how you might pluck a body from the past, in whatever place it might have been — sprawled like a cat’s along the wide seat of a dark car, hidden in a train to a town that lost its name, crouched by a felled stump between the trees — and set it home again, lovingly, to redirect its story and the part you occupied within it.

For want of clarity, perfected and whole, keep the score. Track time. Let memorial become material. A record keeps us honest; we want, and we hope.