Journal entry 4/20/23

On Now: Thoughts on memory, being held, and the act of making things

A stream-of-consciousness, living, breathing journal entry from the end of April that brought questions and revealed truths that are still whirring in the background of my mind.

It’s been a season of learning and growing and making. In the moments I have when I’m not playing with my son, and sometimes even when I am, I find myself making things; wanting to do something with my hands. Making bread, making memories, making a garden, making a love, a life, everything. I flour countertops and mix dough when I first wake up and meditate to the stretching and folding of the wild yeast. I stuff wet black soil into pots with my son’s yellow plastic shovel to bring a sense of play to this work of making things. He watches me but doesn’t put his hands in the dirt like I do. He draws orange circles on the back porch with chalk. The circles double back on each other and then trail off like shooting stars. We eat blackberries until our mouths turn purple and share peach popsicles in the sun; our hands sticky with the joy of being alive.

I make plans to go to Mexico and California, but I never book airfare. Instead, I book another trip to the Isle of Palms off the South Carolina coast because I always seem to end up finding my way back to this salty place strewn with palmettos and moss-covered oak trees. I make outlines for my novel and write scenes that keep me up at night thinking about their internal darkness. I pen bad poems about love—what it is, but mostly, what it isn’t.

I make time for myself, for my body. I make time, I make space for my partner, to feel his hands on my hips—not in passing from one task to the next, but in the all-encompassing desire and lust we had for each other when we lived in a shitty apartment by the sea in Los Angeles. I make an appointment for acupuncture and don’t tell anyone when it’s over so I can sit in the sun unhurried getting words out of my head.

I dye my hair orange like it was before the pandemic—when we went to New York that one hot summer and sweat dripped down the back of my thighs onto the Brooklyn bridge. Someone called me Clementine like Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and I thought about how I’ve never wanted to erase another person from my mind, but I have wanted to erase myself. For most, if not all, of my life I’ve felt like an afterthought. Writing has given me a way to say I am here. I exist. And motherhood has made me believe it.

I track time by the way my son went from calling me mama to mommy, by the dwindling brightness of my hair—going from tangerine to peach, by the way my grandmother’s mind is fading from dementia. A psychologist had to be called to her room because she was hysterical. She said the soldiers were coming to kill me. I asked what soldiers, but she just kept on crying. I wondered if she was remembering the war. Seven years old, fleeing to France on foot from her home in Belgium to escape the Nazis who had taken over Brussels. Her grandfather had to carry her part of the way. He limped and staggered because his prostate had swelled up like a balloon for a reason no one knew. They walked for days until they came upon a barn somewhere in the country where they could rest. They were underground, in the cellar, where they kept the chickens when the bomb hit. There was one tiny window letting a rectangle of light into the otherwise blackness and the shards of glass shattered against my grandmother’s face. She could hear her grandfather screaming for her.

Rosemarie! Rosemarie!

They searched for each other in the dark. The Nazis arrived. One of them held my grandmother while another took the glass out of her face. She told me they were gentle. She told me they were nice.

Isn’t it weird how the things that can destroy us can sometimes be the very thing that makes us feel held?

My grandmother has already been erased without her even knowing, or maybe she does know and maybe that’s the scariest thing of all. You feel yourself fading but there’s nothing you can do about it. The memories are disappearing and there’s no way to hold onto them. I think about my son and all the memories I try to keep and log away in my mind, but I know I won’t remember them when I need to. I think about myself and how I am forever flickering and how it’s in the making things, in the writing, in the creation, where I can hold and be held by the brightness and say, I am here. I am here. I am here.

What do you do to hold onto memory, to remind yourself that you are here?

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