these fragments I have shored against my ruin

Oh, memory.

I was discussing with my friend the idea that the way we remember it, the way it made us feel and the things we documented and recorded and understood, these things exist only in our head and not in the actual event. Because how could it? It was not that way for the witness, the mate, the co conspirator. Their story, their experience, is so different from ours. Even though all of the physical elements are the same, words, actions, locations, the experience is so different as to make it seem like we were not in the same place at all.

This occurs to me as I am reading this book, The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion. In it she discusses grief and loss and the nearly unbearable effects of both. Unbearable because it is not unbearable at all, I infer. And I realize, now, suddenly, that the things that I have grieved for and mourned over were losses, yes, some of them staggering, others patently frivolous, but were only (nearly) unbearable to me because of the way I remembered them. Not the way they really were, perhaps. If I could get that into my head, if I could just get that. I have these things, these memories, and I take them out and I speak to them and I go What I would give to have this, even just once more. And that's like the death of a thousand cuts. Little pieces at a time, taken seperately they are irritants but compounded become fatal. Little things. The time we did this. The time he said that. The way we were together and apart when we knew we would be together at the end. The way things were, were, even though they actually were not. Because if they had been, if they had been really, wouldn't it have been the same for both of us? In order for it to be real, for it to have been?

And so I look at them, these little videos that run constantly despite my best efforts, and I wonder what it was like for them. For him. That thing that was so important to me and was clearly just, not, important at all. What was his experience that time? What was the reality of the situation from his perspective? Was the look that I took to be love really just the fleeting thought of how the Yankees had picked up Alex Rodriguez, and how different would that have made the rest of that experience, had I known? That time that he had gotten up from his chair and walked over and rubbed the back of my neck, was that really a shared intimacy or was he simply tired of seeing the tag on my shirt? That time that he left without kissing me only to turn back and do it, was that really the sense that he had missed something important or was it something else entirely, something unrelated to me and us and what I thought our life was?

The last time that I saw Scott, actually saw him physically, right in front of me, he did something. We had decided that this time we would go to the courthouse seperately because going at the same time, meeting each other there for the purpose of severing our ties, was making me crazy. It really was. So we made this decision, and I closed the door to my car, and he watched me for a minute and then he came over and opened the door and gave me the last hug that I would ever get from him. And I thought How great of him, to see what a mess I am right now and decide that he could not let that be the way we went, the way things went, that he would do me this last kindness and then be gone. Later, when I got home, I discovered something behind me in the seat. It was a document that I had refused to take from him on several occasions. He had walked over, opened my door, and hugged me in order to place those papers there, where I could not refuse them.

How differently would my life have gone if I had not discovered those papers? If I had been left with my version of events, the version in which he is thoughtful and compassionate at the very end? How much has the reality of the event colored my perception of our entire life together, of him as a person, of me as a person, that I did not elicit that response in my own husband, that the sight of me breaking two feet away did not actually move him in the slightest, that I had that little effect? I wish I didn't know, because I do know, and I know that the versions that I choose to live with are mine only, and that I create them, and they are not real. My memories are not real. They are fabrications, the way I interpreted and projected and chose to see things. A fantasy. Every single one.

So now, I am clinical in most every interaction that I have. What is that, what do you mean, how did this strike you and how will you remember this? It drove one person in particular to accept my resignation from position of night time companion with an exhale of relief, and he told me that he had not known how much longer he could deal with it anyway, the constant need for explanation and clarification, that he was uncomfortable even walking in to the room in case I wanted to know why he had walked in with his left foot leading.

That's difficult to hear, because I know when I'm doing it and I do it anyway, because I also know that if I don't ask, if I don't have that clarification, I will eat myself alive from the inside out imagining all the possible implications of leading with the left foot. And I see myself doing it, hear myself demanding an explanation, and I imagine myself just letting it go for once, just this time, and I don't. Even when I do, I don't, because I bring it up later. Remember when you said that? Remember? Well try, because I need to ask you something. And the sigh.

But I want to make sure I'm getting it right, see? I want to make sure that I'm not seeing something that isn't there, that later, when I go This is what was, that I am confident that it really was.

I wonder if it makes a difference, really. I think it would. I think it would be easier to accept, later, the knowledge of how it had been all along, and that maybe my loss is not as monumental as I think because really, it was never what I thought it had been.