TheBanyanTree: Random writing

[Sally Larwood]

Oh my goodness Monique! Wonderful, insightful as always. We are so lucky to have you. 

Sal
Sent from my mini iPad

> On 18 Dec 2015, at 16:27, Monique Colver <monique.colver at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> When she looked back at her life, at the whole of it, she wondered how she
> could have missed so much of it. It’s not as if she didn’t remember it,
> that’s not the same thing at all, but she wanted more to have lived it, and
> not just remembered it. It was well documented, her life, from the earliest
> pictures to the more recent ones that showed her saggy wrinkled face, but
> documentation wasn’t the same as living, was it? She had proof she’d lived,
> but proof wasn’t what she wanted. Sometimes she thought that she might
> prefer to have no proof, for then she could remember it the way she wanted.
> Pictures had their own way of making all the things she didn’t remember
> seem more real, more present, and the things she did remember weren’t the
> same in the pictures. It was as if the pictures were of someone else’s life.
> 
> 
> It wasn’t the way she remembered it.
> 
> 
> Sometimes she would try to tell her husband how she felt, and he would look
> at her with that expression he had, the one with the raised eyebrows and
> the crinkly smile right at the corners of his mouth, as if he were trying
> to keep from laughing, and the feelings would dissipate, as if swallowed
> whole by his disbelief.
> 
> '
> 
> She’d turn away then, so he couldn’t see her confusion as she tried to
> remember what she’d been feeling, what she was trying to say.
> 
> 
> Words were so much harder now than they had ever been before. They had
> faded away, along with her appetite and good looks, and contentment, which
> had once seemed to have no end to its abundance.
> 
> 
> She was no longer content, not with her life or her place in the world, and
> she didn’t quite know what had happened to it. There were days when she
> thought her husband, the fourth, had stolen it from her, and she would yell
> at him to give it back, that she knew what he’d done.
> 
> 
> And when she did, he did not look at her bemusedly, but with disdain and an
> impatience that flew across his face like an afternoon storm. That wasn’t
> as bad as what followed though, his conciliatory tone, “Rach, you’ve
> forgotten again.”
> 
> 
> She was fairly certain she had three children, or maybe it was two. Maybe
> four. When she couldn’t remember she would take out the pictures labeled
> “family” to see if it would come back to her, but she couldn’t tell from
> the pictures of smiling children if they were the same people in later
> photos, grown up and mugging for the camera. She thought sometimes she
> might have five or six children because they looked so different from one
> time to another. She’d stopped asking her husband because he always sighed,
> as if she were intentionally forgetting.
> 
> 
> In the afternoons she’d go to her room at the end of the hall, though
> sometimes she wasn’t sure if it was her room or the room of her daughter,
> if she had a daughter, and she’d stretch out on the big bed covered in the
> quilt she was fairly certain that someone who looked like her had made
> once, and she’d sleep for an hour, maybe two.
> 
> 
> And in her afternoon sleep she would remember her life the way it was, all
> the joy and all the sorrow, all mixed together like it is in life, her
> children the proper number, her husbands too. She’d wake up with a smile
> because that had been her life, and she loved it all, when she could
> remember how it had been.
> 
> 
> She never dreamed at night, only in the afternoons, and so she never missed
> an afternoon nap, and every day she woke up from it she wished she could
> sleep more, if only to remember who she had been.
> 
> 
> Monique