July 4th weekend. Three barbeques in two days. Burgers, chicken, scallop cerviche. Corn-on-the-cob. Watermelon. More watermelon. Puppies, babies, suburbs, a new house. Missed the fireworks. Roamed the streets of Somerville, looking for a hill with a view. Hit my social threshold, three times over.
Lately conversation seems like work. Dying to talk about something other than houses, jobs, babies, dogs, the South Beach diet, and George Bush. My soul feels unnourished. Nothing feels very real anymore.
Monday, a holiday, woke up to drizzle following a beautiful-weekend-for-barbeques. Woke with an ache in my chest, in that spot at the center where your ribs split off. The diaphragm, I think it’s called. I kept putting my hand there throughout the day, trying to feel the physical spot on my body that the ache was emanating from.
It was residue from my dreams. Tiring, winding dreams full of emotional alleyways. People known and not known floated in and out. The last moment before waking, standing in the kitchen – my mother’s kitchen – red brick linoleum, white countertops, wooden cabinets – someone is making me go through the cupboards and throw stuff out. I don’t know who. A shadow presence. Myself, no doubt. I open a tin of China black tea, hold it up to my nose. The smell of the tea hits me with a wallop. No, not a smell, an emotion. A memory. I clutch the tin of tea to my chest and silently plead to be allowed to keep it. Please don’t make me throw this one away. A primal cry shakes my soul.
I awaken aching. Clutching my tea. My sleeping, waking pragmatic mind tries to wrestle it to the ground. What memory are you clinging to? I ask myself. A resonance of my last weeks in New Zealand surfaces as the answer. Yes, this again. Always this. But what is the memory of? I flip through my scrapbook brain searching for a snapshot, searching for the source of my ache. I find nothing. I find no single accountable memory.
I sit up in bed. It’s 8 a.m. My cat stretches and yawns. “What’s the matter?” Dennis asks. “I had a weird dream,” I say. My dream hurt me. Punched me in the gut. “Do you want to tell me about it?” “No. I don’t know. I can’t remember it. I want coffee first.”
Before leaving the house, I checked my email. Got an email from an old friend. A friend from my last year of high school, a few college summers. He tells me he’s been thinking about me lately – works with someone who reminds him of me – wants to hear my voice. This email from my friend, his memory of me, this voice from my past, links hands with my tea tin and settles into the ache in my chest. I wonder what I’ll tell him of the life I’ve developed for myself, of the person I’ve become. Will I complain to him about how expensive real estate is in the Northeast? Will I rave to him about the South Beach diet?
Nestled at a table at 1369, feet tucked up, table lamp casting its warm yellow glow, I seek safety in my coffee and magazine. I’m reading a month-old New Yorker. An essay called “Hard Lines.”
“I think I would have been happier in publishing,” I say to Dennis, apros pos of nothing. He looks up from his newspaper: “Well? What’s stopping you?” Oh, how many times have I had this conversation.
Dennis once had a pal in Europe. A ROTC kid. A truly lost soul. He’d walk past a toy store and say, with utmost earnestness, “You know, I always wanted to own a toy store.” Then he’d pass a dog on the street and say, just as earnestly, “I always wanted to be a veterinarian.” What would be known in my family as a complete flake. The notion of which prevents me from chasing after every half-baked dream that floats into my head. Dennis mentions this kid whenever I say things like, “maybe I should go back to school for psychology.” Dennis thinks I should pursue writing. It’s obvious to him. It’s not obvious to me. In my indecision – in my fear of my own capacity for flakiness – I just stay where I am. Corporate marketing wonk. Perhaps this is why nothing feels real anymore.
I go back to my magazine. I go back to my ache. I no longer know what my aspirations are. There’s nothing that I’m dying to do with my life. Not even writing. I just know that I don’t want to do what I’m doing. I don’t want to be a marketing wonk. I don’t want to go to barbeques and have conversations about buying houses in the suburbs and fad diets.
“I feel like I’m living an emotionally half-assed existence,” I say to Dennis. He looks up from his newspaper again. He doesn’t really want to have this conversation. I tell him about my dream and about the email from my friend – this voice from my past, which in a way represents my own voice from a self I no longer am, holding me accountable for who I’ve become. I’m on the brink of tears. The ache, I realize, as I’m talking, comes from feeling like my memories are more real than my actual life. With my fingers I trace the grain of the wooden tabletop. I observe the color of the lamplight on the wood. I lay my hand flat on it’s surface. This table should be more real to me than my memories. But it’s not.
The persistence of memory. I loved that particular Dali painting for a long time before I ever understood it. It was featured in the creative writing chapter of my third grade English textbook. My introduction to expressionist writing. I finally came to understand what it meant at a tiny Dali museum in Paris. The only museum I went to the entire time I was in Europe. I don’t much care for museums. But standing in front of this particular painting in the museum’s small, dimly lit enclave, it suddenly made sense. The melting clocks. The unreliability of time, of reality, melting under the persistent force of memory. That was my interpretation anyway.
I talk myself out. Babble about the poignance of my memories, the absence of poignance in my life, my lack of direction, the dullness of our friends, the dullness of my job. Dennis listens, his infinite patience belied only by the rhythmic twitch in his jaw muscle. I take my cue. I offer him another coffee, and go back to my half-read essay.
The passage I return to begins with a big letter “M.” I read it out loud to Dennis:
Memory is fiction – an anecdotal version of some scene or past event we need to store away for present or future use. John McCrone, a British science correspondent, writing in a recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement, calls memories “cognitive reconstructions,” and goes on to say that our brains, though not well evolved for retrospection or contemplation, never give up a reshuffling process in their effort to extract what is general and what is particular about each passing moment of life. Garry Wills, in his book “Saint Augustine’s Memory,” writes, “The past…is not an inert structure in which we can deposit a remembered item to remain unchanged until called up again…In fact, what is being recalled is the experience that a person underwent in acquiring anything to be remembered.”
I sometimes feel as though I’m living my life on autopilot. I go through the motions, but the real living is going on in my head. I guess the point is to make your life more real than the activity in your head. I guess that’s easier recognized than achieved.
I listen to the rain outside. Feel the cool damp air brush against my bare arms each time the door opens. Drink down the last of my now-cold coffee. I look around at all the Inman Square bohemians spending this rainy Monday afternoon in the little pink coffeehouse. I take note that this moment is more real than that tea tin in my chest.
