Memory: Alone in the Moonlight

 Wednesday's word is memory.



Memory:


(mĕm'ə-rē)
n., pl., -ries.

1. The mental faculty of retaining and recalling past experience.
2. The act or an instance of remembering; recollection: spent the afternoon lost in memory.
3. All that a person can remember: It hasn't happened in my memory.
4. Something remembered: pleasant childhood memories.
5. The fact of being remembered; remembrance: dedicated to their parents' memory.

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/memory-psych-in-encyclopedia#ixzz1YbNEUM5q




 The words below are an excerpt from the book I'm currently writing.


Memory is both fragile and powerful.   We all have a need to make sense out of our lives and the events in them.   We all write the stories of ourselves basing then on the bits and pieces of the past that break into our now.  We are often wrong.  Our subconscious works overtime trying to protect us.  We shield our sanity in a fragile shell.  Our capacity for denial is especially strong.

We weave the scattered parts of our lives into a past that explains our futures to us.  There is much that doesn’t make sense.  Life rarely has a neat beginning, middle and end but we so desperately seek some order in the chaos that we become masters of fiction.  This fiction supports our tomorrows.  We come to rely on it as we stagger toward an uncertain future. 

If we were to stop assembling the fiction of our lives, how could we continue?   If we were to face the truth hidden behind all that we deny, all that we block from our awareness,  would we be rendered useless before all that is to come?

We are fiction writers.   Cutting away all the layers of time as we create the character that we believe ourselves to be.   How could we bear the truth?   So few of us are really special.  We  aren’t more noble, more honest, more gifted than others most of the time but we believe ourselves to be.  Those assumptions move us forward into our tomorrow. 

Try to feel equal to, just as worthy as any one you meet today,   I dare you.  It’s very hard to do.    Critical judgment will break through our best intentions.  We all have “feet of clay” and yet we all believe we were blessed with wings.

I know that my memories of childhood and of my life carry only bits and pieces of reality.  Reality and I are often at odds.  Over the years, I have just begun discover how much my memories have tried to save me.   They guard the dark corners of my mind.  Memory protects and disturbs.  I struggle to make sense of it and in the struggle I weave a tale.  In sickness and in health, for richer and poorer, till death do us part, memory is an unfaithful partner.   It is all I have.