Cleaning Out the Inbox, or Nepenthe
There is something to be said for the art of forgetting.
Time does not heal all wounds so much as it accustoms us to their aching. Time sands down the edges that pricked us, shifting them just out of focus: we are nearsighted creatures. The past never needs to move as far as we think it does to elude us. It takes so little to make us forget. Maybe we are looking for distractions.
Going through old correspondence reminds us of what we have lost. Well, it reminded me, anyway. Part of me wants to do the mature thing, appreciate what we had while we had it, and accept that nothing lasts forever. But part of me is mourning afresh. The wounds have not healed; they were just heaped with debris.
Now that I have rediscovered this warmth, I would not forget it for anything — not for surcease of sorrow, not for new loves. I would not give up these memories for anything — but I cannot help wanting what was.
Good friends are so rare. And as I get older it becomes harder and harder to love.
Space
We are drifting, and with that admission the anger grows and festers and lingers, clawing to smother the grief, struggling after rage to forget the loss.
I fought so long against losing, but that battle is only the fight against admission. You can’t hold on to people. It’s taken me so long to realize that. Persephone would have been taken from Demeter eventually — there’s no getting around that. Not by death, maybe, but love and violence and the drift, the space between people that grows steadily but unobtrusively, the way the universe expands — atom by atom, until suddenly gravity fails, gravity betrays us and baffled antimatter occupies a once-human space.
Such melodrama over a moment. But it is never a moment. There is no moment to pinpoint, no instance to seize from the aether and accuse, entreat, refuse. The drift just happens. Imperceptible, but irreversible. Irredeemable.
This is what it means to be people in time: we cannot escape from the past, but we cannot hold on to our present, because what we think of as now, the things of which we are aware, are already past. As soon as we can see something it is behind us. Who said that? No immortal — they were slaves to their passions instead, because Time could not govern them. Neither Kronos nor Dike nor the Erinyes could hold the Olympians. Maybe Nemesis — but she appears only after the commission of a crime.
What manner of people conceives of such gods?
