Week 31: Two years, the life of Safran and numbing pain.

Like a thief in the night, it creeps up silently behind you; catching you unawares till the very moment that you were informed that it has already been two years. Two years? Wow. It sure doesn’t feel like two years because I can still remember, with extreme vividness, where I was at, what I was doing, who I was with and the myriad of emotions I felt crashing down on me, two years ago. Two years ago sounds like such a long time, but two years ago feels just like yesterday.

How do you measure time spent in two years?

1051200 minutes? 17520 hours? 730 days? 104 weeks? 24 months?

Do you keep track of two years by the number of sunrises? How about the number of sunsets? How many times you smiled or laughed out loud without a care? Perhaps it is the number of times you cried. Joyous events? New people you meet? Holidays? Personal accomplishments? Tragedies?

Are these all measures to help dampen the effect, to blur the memory? By living our lives everyday and overloading the senses, is it, perhaps, an inbuilt mechanism to help us get through or deal with the fact that it has already been two years? Are we secretly trying to forget even though we repeatedly assure ourselves that, yes, I want to remember and I want to keep that memory alive and burning in me?

Sometimes, I feel like I don’t want to forget, yet, I feel like I can’t not forget. Every day that I remember is every day spent feeling guilty, of wishing that I could have done things differently, or spending more time, or calling back more often, or having more photographs to look back upon.

It’s been two years, and I’m still waiting for my memory to blur itself out of my consciousness.

. . .

Excerpt from Everything Is Illuminated. Adequately sums up how hard losing memories can be!

He had also lost a wife, not to death but to another man. He had returned from an afternoon at the library to find a note covering the SHALOM! of their home’s welcome mat: I had to do it for myself.

But his wife was his first and only love, and it was the nature of those from the tiny village to forgive their first and only loves, so he forced himself to understand, or pretend to understand. As for the note, he couldn’t bear to keep it, but he couldn’t bear to destroy it either. So he tried to lose it.

He left it by the wax-weeping candle holders, placed it between matzos every Passover, dropped it without regard among rumpled papers on his cluttered desk, hoping it wouldn’t be there when he returned. But it was always there. He hid it like a bookmark in one of the novels he most hated, but it would appear several days later between the pages of one of the books that he alone in the village read, one of the books that the note had now spoiled for him forever.

He couldn’t for the life of him lose the note. It kept returning to him. It stayed with him, like a part of him, like a birthmark, like a limb, it was on him, in him, him, his hymn: I had to do it for myself.

He had lost so many slips of paper over time, and keys, pens, shirts, glasses, watches, silverware. He had lost a shoe, his favourite opal cufflinks, three years away from Trachimbrod, millions of ideas he intended to write down (some of them wholly original, some of them deeply meaningful), his hair, his posture, two parents, two babies, his wife, a fortune in pocket change, more chances than could be counted. He even lost a name. There seemed to be nothing he couldn’t lose. But that slip of paper wouldn’t disappear, ever.

. . .

by the way, my left arm hurts like shit! who knew that the after-effects of injections on your forearm could be so devastating?! for a moment, i was really worried that the vaccines would throw up all plans of having the best weekend and subsequent week EVER (in terms of R-OH consumption), but apparently, i have nothing to fear. TWO MORE DAYS TWO MORE DAYS!