“Well you can fall for chains of silver
and you can fall for chains of gold
you know you fall for pretty strangers
and the promises they hold
well you promised me everything
and then you promised me thick and thin
and now you just turn away and say ‘Romeo?
I think I used to have a scene with him.'”
-Indigo Girls (via Dire Straits), “Romeo and Juliet”
I am almost too depressed to post. I am undergoing this kind of self-enforced torture that comes from thinking through various thoughts which inevitably lead me to something that references some shared part of the past, only for that to jolt me like an electric shock with the idea that this memory, this idea, this concept, whatever it may be, is dead to me. That the past runs thick with poison and the toxicity is threatening to drown everything in my entire memory. I understand the naive desires of those depicted in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”. I comprehend why people voluntarily submit to electro-convulsive therapy, to lobotomy. The process of training one’s mind to set off alarm bells at every fond remembrance is just too painful, too time-consuming, too angsty.
How low can the needle go? I found myself asking this question as an almost rhetorical device for this very process, only to of course realize that such was itself a reference from the past decade, the nine years of my life destined to be obliterated or rigged with criss-crossing booby-trap wires until it’s finally paved over. A snowy drive through the hinterlands of Vermont, New Hampshire, then cross-eyed tired by the time we got to Route 1 between New Brunswick and Princeton. The Kia spinning out under Emily’s wheeled control, the fortuitous placement of the raging semis that dodged us in seemingly every direction before she righted the ship. How thinking through the memory prompts the ultimate and obvious question: what if the worst had happened that day? That day, or a handful like it, so many incidents and accidents along the way that would have cut things short in such a more natural way. It is hard not to yearn for revision, rewriting, re-evaluation, no matter how catastrophic. It is hard not to root for things that could have precluded being here.
We can’t pave the past, of course, neither under the desires of a cataclysmic edit nor the obliteration of surgical removal. We have to live with it, live through it, again and again, eliciting the cold sweats and terror of how quickly a lifetime of memories can be replaced by a graveyard of ghosts. I am haunted, eternally, watching each transformation as golden amber days are rusted into bitterness before my mind’s very eye. When I started this little note, it was about a steamroller or a bulldozer, about new unforgiving asphalt come to pave paradise and put up a parking lot. But nothing is so simple. Instead, it’s the deadly breath of an ice queen, an ice age perhaps, come to blow the life out of all that was good. But instead of bland asphalt, we have only the suddenly broken pieces of what was so recently whole and vibrant.
This is not the way things ought die. They ought decay, wither, descend slowly into the gloom. Cliff-jumping into the abyss is for madness.
