I’m enjoying moving around the spaces contained within these memories.
It’s surprising how vivid they still are in my mind, the spatial awarenesses.
And I can feel cemented memories being made – when I’ve moved through a memory before and go back to, for example, that day in my mind, then the memory most recently travelled is the first one to come forward. I have to walk past it to see the others; the ones which are still accessible, still within reach if I consciously explore them, but which I know would otherwise fade away into the realm of unknowing.
There is some unknowing already, and it’s fun finding it. Walking back from the swimming centre, for example, I remember seeing a Star Wars display in the back of someone’s car, made of little toys. The moment after that is unknown, and will be forever, as is the exact contents of the display – I wasn’t paying attention in whatever way is needed to save that data into my memory banks.
But I remember leaving the centre; the summit, as it was, of my mission to relocate my family, presumably after taking a little too long to change.
And the entrance way, now a vague, hazy painting, with its steps leading down. There was a turnstile, maybe, but I can feel another memory leaking into that one – a memory I don’t have a full picture of, it’s not something I’ve accessed in a very long time, it may as well be from a dream.
The easiest points to remember are the emotional beats, not words, but feelings. Talking with my sister in a small bubble pool – and suddenly, as I’m writing this: the flicker of who else was there, an image I’ve tried to grasp before but found out of reach, it appears: There was a man, with a small girl, much younger than Cody and Broda. I remember him now because I recall wondering if the words I spoke, the dialogue with myself and my sister, would that affect the man, with his younger child?
That’s something I do, when an interesting conversation blooms before an accidental audience, I’m aware of my words, the power they have, the ears linking minds linking worlds, the undercurrents of meaning, the fragments being forever created and reassembled into something not unlike their world, but coloured slightly differently, to finally be assimilated into their conception of reality.
And I remember Cody jumping, and the worry in me, and the reassurance from Emma that he’s fine, and the bigger reassurance above that, saying it’s cool, she’s got this, something I knew right away from the first time I saw them together, her and her son, her and her partner, I didn’t need to worry if they were safe, if he’d be ok, I knew that he would be, all doubts forgotten in an instant. She’s better than I could ever have imagined.