TheBanyanTree: Random writing

[Monique Colver]

Aw, thank you Sal!
On Dec 17, 2015 9:39 PM, "Sally Larwood" <larwos at me.com> wrote:

> 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
>