Remembrance

In the swirl of a memory, he pictures it at last, the thing he has been looking for, but it quickly leaves his grasp, as if he was sleeping, and the dream had enveloped itself, guarding its treasure with fangs, ready to strike with its poison tail, and he cries, he cries for life is unfair and his feelings are hurt.

Then he remembers wonderful things and then things that are awful, and then thinks he can recreate them. So he does. He spends the rest of his life, which his very short, doing things that he kind of remembers doing hoping to recreate the feeling of wonderment that often accompanied it, the nostalgia that keeps his hopes alive, but nothing matters, it barely reacts, from the body to the mind, to the spirit to the heart, something is missing.

The key memory is missing, the one that will tell who he really is.

He spends a lifetime wondering, and then planning, and then pondering, and then completely fucking it all up, that there is nothing he can do that will make him recover what he has lost. But he tries, he tries like no other person has tried before, and when he realizes he cannot do it alone, he goes from town to town looking for others to help him. So many offer themselves the opportunity to help someone in need, someone who is so desperate to live but is troubled.

He must live but in order to live he must remember, but he doesn’t remember so what he has is not a life, but something that is constantly lived, but never experienced.

“I used to feel happiness and joy, but it was taken away. It is a memory, a warmth that nobody knows, a thought that I no longer have, a dream I no longer can place, but they all flood in flashes, trying to make themselves known. That is the essence of who I am now. Someone who chases those things, hoping that they exist still, so that I can exist peacefully too. There it is me, the person I was, so I can know who I can become.”

He continues in search of a memory while the time he has slowly withers away. He believes he is not wasting it, because to know oneself is the greatest endeavor of all, so what he is doing is an act of love, a deed of a kindness, a feeling of greatness, a fulfillment unlike any other, so that he can, in due time, be who he needs to be, when the right time calls for it.

And it happens.

He remembers the memory one second before he dies, and it is there, wrapped in an embrace from a loved one, in the very presence of the warmth that envelopes him, in the world that is so beautiful, that he realizes it early and late, that he now knows, at last, who he wants, how he wants it, and how he is going to get it. The freedom dies with the freed heart, he believes, and so he does, and so does his memory.