Chapter 1 (Familiar Bedfellows)

It’s odd how our memories live with us. At times, intrusive and meddlesome. Showing up like an illegitimate child on your doorstep, demanding to be recognized and threatening to shake your carefully manicured life into maelstrom. And other times they are the warm spot on the mattress beside you, their ghost being so present and intimate just hours before. Whether ubiquitous or at arm’s length they are strange instruments, their tone and clamor shifting and converging with our waking and subconscious lives alike. It is as if they crept into our souls and established an unauthorized symbiotic relationship, an oligarchy of recycled reactions, an aftermath of acts of commission and omission.

I used to think that my reflections were a perishable commodity. And if I did not exhume them often they would crumble somewhere in the recesses of my mind, condemned structures left to overgrowth and the elements. How I wish that was the case. The reality is much more demanding. Memories never fade, die, or expire; they evolve, consumed but never digested. If I were to look at this life and the thing we call time as a linear structure I should have nothing to fear from memories or the past, but as it turns out life isn’t so neat, not so structured and rigid.

Our past and our recollections of the past collude with one another, not content to be left wandering about the synapses, dodging signals and static. I have often made promises and solemn oaths to both myself and the Lord that certain actions, having proved abysmal, should never be repeated. Those oaths then clung to the memories they were affiliated and left a red mark across the face of them like a quarantine sign. The years of dormancy give us assurance, give us hope that the plague behind those doors locked in chains is a settled affair. Seldom do we learn that there are no locked doors, no steel chains or settled affairs inside the catacombs of our minds. All things dormant, all things repressed will one day throw off their chains, open the flood gates and come rushing back to the tips of our fingers and tongues.

How often my mask has been ripped aside, my clandestine talk revealed. Pardon if I switch to first person, this is where my thoughts cease to be entirely universal and become slightly shrouded with a unique set of persons and situations. Truly the heart of my mistakes and memories are as plain and quotidian as any other. I tend to (in the past and sometimes still) excuse my actions, when placed beside the history of missteps and misdeeds as sui generis, a childish attempt to find mercy amid scrutiny. Circumstance is simply the father of excuse, an illusion that our trespasses are special and therefore require a new set of standards and repercussions. The minuscule is not an exception, it’s the bacteria growing gangrenous on the limb we’ve dubbed ‘excuse’.

So I will put aside excuse, using explanation in substitution. I rather like explanation, it has method to its form and application, whereas excuse muddies the waters of who, what where and why with drama, like so much of my generation, infinitely arrested in pre-pubescent pardon of their own actions. At least with explanation the guise of objectivity is established, albeit loosely. There can be some semblance of rational thought and character deconstruction, but only to the point where it stings too deeply I suppose. Even in self evaluation I find myself in a quagmire of sorts. I have to insist regularly that a man of strength is one who is able and willing to tackle his weaknesses, both out in the open and seclusion. But even coming to that realization requires a paradigm shift of assertions.

The belief that I can intimately know the breadth of my flaws all at once and act as watchmen, sole enforcer or unbiased judge of my mind; is mindless. To assert that I can aptly apply strength and see with clarity each set of contiguous abstentions and indulgences all in tandem is to remove the role of God from my internal conflict altogether. This precursor to destruction must be removed, a prideful cyst in need of biopsy. What I find instead is something simpler, much more humbling than me cherry picking my flaws to expose to the sunlight. I need not the pretense of objectivity, I need an actual working model, one that can only be found in another.

We as people don’t seem to cherish the role of informer inherently. Reproach and repercussion are as instinctually vile as they are essential, and I cannot live rightly without them. I cannot live left to my own devices, or it may be more apt to say that I do not wish to live alone with only these shape shifters we call memories. They are certainly familiar bedfellows, and although I have come to know them intimately they lend no new joy, just subtle revelations that I have led a life of mistakes and collisions.

I say collisions, not accidents. An accident happens when it’s raining out, and maybe you shouldn't have been driving, and perhaps you might have paid better attention to the nervous and brake prone driver directly in front of you but you can be forgiven for all that. A more appropriate term may be wreck, it may not carry with it a moral weight natively but to me it tends to ring out carnage, twisted metal, two dead 1 wounded, wood crosses and wreathes slowly growing faint and waterlogged in a ditch like a spectacle for everyone to see. There are some memories we retell with a preface that asserts over and over that the following story was and is indeed an accident. Then there are others that are far too glaring to even attempt such a show, they are better locked up and hopefully forgotten, but we all know better. This story is about those memories, pale from being kept from the sun, hungry and desperate to be let out.

So I suppose that this is the preface, where I beg for understanding and sympathy in my retelling. I tend to appeal to a higher sense, asking not that your stomach move you to damn me, but I fear that the head may oft prove less forgiving than your senses. I guess I should ask for whatever reaction or repulsion that is the least bleak, the more gracious condemnation and perhaps invite you to use whatever mechanism in us that translates madness and tragedy into laughter and comedy. Some may find the contents vulgar, grossly particular or maybe just entirely superfluous. And they may be right, they may all be present. But I am tired of these secrets that have been locked away, as if in a wooden box, their little dark hands fighting and twisting out of the grates, clutching and grasping at the air.

G.K. Chesterton once wrote that a humble man is often the one who talks too much, proud men watch themselves too closely. Afraid to venture a thought lest it be wrong and they appear foolish, their delicate façade tarnished, and if they do speak it is seldom in questions or confessions. I will not shout to make my point, nor will I plead for you to bend backwards to look through the glass that I use to view this life. But if in reading you feel somehow connected, strangely amused or that you see what I see, then you will know that you and I both are being vindicated. Every time a written sin reaches up through your heart to your understanding we are both a little less alone. We are both a little less human.