Amongst the scattered pigeons …
So why am I telling these stories? I am trying to
understand where my heart broke, and why it continues to break, unceasingly, into
so many fragments. But the more I struggle with telling this story, the more I
am forced to accept that my story is not mine alone, and my pain, likewise is a
shared pain.
My story is a story of a shared history, a history
lived through others. My resentment, likewise, is scattered through all
their stories, and to tell mine fully; theirs must be told too. However, it is
not a history I can provide evidence for, or a history I can claim is true.
It is a history in my mind; that I feel a deep connection to. A
history of emotions, not events. How to relate this history? Where to
start? Where is the beginning? And why am I so concerned with telling these
stories?
I suppose I could tell it in parts, but I am afraid
that might miss the point, that the essential threads might be lost, the
threads which bind history to the present, which make us relive the realities
we’ve left behind. But how to hold your attention? How to ensure your
eyes don’t glaze over at my next sentence? I will start in the present.
I cannot start at the beginning. We are already
here, and the journey eludes memory. And I cannot start at the end, because I
do not know the end. But bear with me, because this story somehow transcends
the usual stories and it explains how we have come to be here. In any event, in
the way I imagine it; it is a story that distinguishes itself from others.
I’m hoping this story unlocks something. What that
is I do not know. It is something I feel, more than I comprehend. Something I
desire, but can only intuit. My story begins here, as you will see as the story
unfolds. Its beginning is embedded in the present, and moves forward with every
moment of it. It is inescapable. It haunts me in every moment, is resolutely
with me in every experience. I tire of it, so pervasively does it permeate my
reality.
I clutch at fragments, to know myself, and my
experience. They cannot be organised; they can only be assembled. They extend
into too many other spheres, too many other experiences, to be captured and
arranged. When I attempt to collect them they blend together, become
indistinguishable, and begin to hum, like a background noise. Where they begin
and end is unknowable.
Perhaps the same is true of me. So I will tell my
story in a mishmash of scenes and anecdotes, because fragments are all I have
to tell this story with; a kaleidoscope of borrowed memories and feelings. I
rush into them and quickly lose them, as though I were an intruder. I am
amongst the scattered pigeons, so to speak, of memories whirling in the air.
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