If the past can reveal our stowed away hopes and dreams then it can unveil the secrets that we’ve so longed to forget. Remembering is suffering anew. We dive into the darkness of emotions we were happy to neglect, stirring old waters at the bottom of wells of disquietude.
I went back to old letters and dusty notebooks full of a life that once was; hasty notes, lucid insights, attempts at poetry. Some day I might find pleasure in taking a glimpse at what used to occupy my mind; take a glance at who we used to be. Who were we? And how did we allow life to take who we used to be away from us?
Images of the past are incoherent and misleading. I don’t only forget the details but I construct new realities that I can live with and accept. I know they are not true but it makes me feel good to believe they are.
The past that is remembered with all its details can be healing and mortifying at the same instant. Time remembered gives precedence to distinct moments that either fill you with warmth or gnaw at your heart. We must remember so we can forget. We must return to it so we can abandon it.
I picked up the pieces of me trying to remember the person I used to be. Hoping to seize the past, hoping to understand our story, I went back in search for the words, stashed away, trampled on and forsaken. For memories are unreliable; they are but a reflection of our endless capacity to forget. Fragments of a truth the gaps of which we fill with imagination and self-deceit. Images and voices try to remind us of truths that never existed and of unrealities deeply imprinted in our minds.
Finding Truth in memories seems to be deemed hopeless, an effort to capture scenes and emotions of elusive nature. We dream the truth and wake up to unbelievable realities. How can we know who we are and where we’re going if we don’t know who we were and where we came from? How do we know, otherwise, that we are not moving in circles?