Of Everything Past And Present

home memories

№: 31

60.2023

I am home again. There’s a little bit of everything in here. Boxes full of newspaper bits and torn magazines, photos and correspondence, cables and pieces of old tech, half-filled notebooks and dried up pens, hair combs and the hair from the combs, grade reports and exam papers – the family’s history contained in bits and pieces in several of these boxes sprayed throughout the house. This house that I grew up in feels like a tiny house although is in fact much grander than my New York apartment. It has succumbed to dust that has settled upon dust to form a crust on the corners and crevices. Not much has changed. Rather everything has aged – frozen five, ten, fifteen years from a past they whence appeared. Nothing is new, and I dislike this feeling of how old things seem. I rummage through some boxes and can tell a story, one too many of our family’s past. A past that isn’t talked about on a regular basis. Mementos my growing up in this family flood into focus. But now, I am surrounded by siblings who are worlds apart from my immediate experience – having moved into their own houses as I explore this museum of our past.

I find myself organizing, separating the books from papers from photos from trash. I look around and make a cup of instant coffee. How quickly I’ve found myself losing the taste for fresh coffee. Patterns I formed while away fall to the wayside in this malaise of the past. Present tense in this old familiar place requires other forms of being. I find myself being absorbed into old routines of when I was last home. I sense some distance from my peers who have found themselves outside of home through finding one of their own. Do I have a say as to where all the clutter should go? Should I invest myself into this lifetime project to rid ourselves of the anguish that we have collected over years? How does one even begin? Is the kind of resolve required for this process contained in me? What is my complicity in all this?

How much of my motivations are a reflection of my desire for a sense of accomplishment? My mother has spent her years living and being in the way she knows best – a life that cannot become mine no matter how much I try. I am me and she is her. The qualities that I value seem to be at odds with who I am seeing her to be. Yet, just like her, I have started this slow accumulation of things, memories, notes, experiences that have years to fully mature and someday overflow into a cluttered house that I will one day call my home. This aversion to home seems to come from a misunderstanding of the kind of person my mother is – a collector of memories fueled by the refusal to simply let things fade away into mercy of the brain’s short memory. She insists on taking pictures, let’s things bloom to an old age, keeps a record of things she has acquired since she can remember. These are the simple patterns whence every aspect of her life flows from. Yet, I seek the very novelty that has drawn me farther away from knowing a lifetime of living. Five years from now, how can I remember that things I liked, kind of food I ate, books I read, people I talked to if I throw away anchors to the person I am becoming. And that, is perhaps why I turn to this form of recording through words, though inadequate it is to keep a true account of being, of seeing, of understanding this world and what it lays before me. Writing, however, can only be a tool in the attempt to confront my past. It can take me to the gate, but I must enter it myself, and walk through the thorny bushes, jump the cliffs, and brace the storms. Then, just maybe, I will again find the will to write about what I find on the other side of this journey.