Me and my brother ca. 1985-ish?
The second a moment passes, it becomes memory: an entity of its own, nothing short of a dream we relive in our heads never quite the same way as the first time.
In all our iterations of that moment, our future self offers it from an altered perspective, the one they have as the person they are at the moment of retelling. In that sense, as realistic or vivid certain memories feel, they are often a distorted reflection of a moment in life that was just as unique as it was fleeting.
I’ve been digging deep into my own reservoir of memories (poetry writing can have that effect on a person) and keep returning to some core ones, only to discover that there is a different side to them than I was telling myself.
I heard a pantoum today in Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Poetry Unbound podcast, called “Pantoum for recital when my mom said, don’t let them see you cry” by Kay Ulanday Barrett. I love how Pádraig Ó Tuama talks about the poems he reads–he explores their meaning in a way that feels unforced, organic and illuminating, pulling at chords in my chest that open the gates of all the feels.
This specific poem made me rethink how I write about my core memories and it was all thanks to the form of the pantoum: the repetition of lines in a new order, pairing sentences next to others they initially weren’t close to, thus coloring the re-lived experience in a new hue.
It made me think about how sometimes the narratives we tell ourselves have not just been told in our own voice, but that of others in our life, how those instances of great significance have also been manipulated (willingly or not) and turned into something that doesn’t necessarily belong to us anymore, but someone else.
How, quite literally, by rewriting those memories, we can rewrite ourselves and place gravitas onto the parts we want to be defined by.
I found myself crying, as so often I do when I listen to Padraig’s podcast, as I replayed such a core memory in my head, going through the motions of recounting what happened and for once saw a different truth in it, not the one I always took at face value and repeated over 30+ years in my head, tainting it with bitterness and accusation.
Ever since joining Sustenance this past March, I have been encouraged and prompted to write about moments in my life, I never thought I would before. They were way too personal, too close to a wound already healed, or maybe full-on open and bleeding. And yet, I have found that writing, and writing again, and then editing and rewriting, have helped with distilling the experience down to its essence.
It has felt like peeling off a scab to reach the tender pink tissue beneath, probing the still throbbing flesh. I might initially wince at the dull pain I cause myself by exploring, that only lasts a moment though, and then I can blink through the tears and marvel at the beauty of my life’s body–its soft, resilient, forgiving nature, able to heal itself for the second time around.
I can finally sit in peace with the truth that was hiding inside: my truth.