If you truly love something, or someone, you can’t just pretend the downsides away. If you only remember the good things, are you really remembering anything at all? Everything’s contextual. Nothing’s objective, not really. If you only remember the good times, you’ll forget the struggles that gave the good times meaning, the hard work put in to try and get it right this time. For once.
It’s all a work in progress isn’t it, this life? This achingly long, terrifyingly short life. We all exist on spectrums of becomings and unbecomings. We’re all moving toward and away. All dying and all being reborn, all the time. Down to the goddamned mitochondria. The powerhouse of the cell.
You cannot cast a shadow unless you’re bathed in the light. You can’t hide from the blazing sun burning you away unless there’s a tree there to grant you shade. You’re not continuously a good or bad person, we don’t stay any one thing for long, we are the works in progress. It’s not about staying static profane or divine, it’s about getting up each next day and trying again to be a good person. Every day. Each moment. Trying to be good is so much better than believing that just so.
Every day, I’m trying to be a good person. Every day, I fail a little. I’ve so much wrath inside my heart that the ancient goddesses and gods of storm and vengeance would warn me “Don’t say the quiet parts out loud!” I fight the urge to believe myself blameless and entitled just because I have a bit more book learning than most, every single day. It’s in me? I know it’s wrong? I fight it like hell. Sometimes I lose. I’m weak just like everyone, but each time I lose, I try again the next day.
I find myself sometimes being the only person who remembers the bad things in the place that I, in my own tough-love way, love very much. Alan’s murder, Screech exploding himself trying to kill us all, Greg Jeuben’s death and the reprisal-killing of his murderer. Michelle Rounds getting hit by a bus and her family threatening to kill our entire elementary class in kind. These horrors.
None of its ideal, but our stories, my stories, can’t make any sense without them. If I am to be a dark remembrancer, that’s not the worst thing to be. My memory disorder is that I can’t forget a goddamn second, but things we love will never make sense if we aren’t honest how we got here.
On Friday, I found an old board game I’d been looking for with an ex-girlfriend about fifteen years ago. I promised her I’d track it down. I have no idea what happened to her, but I’ll hold onto it, in case our paths cross again. Things ending badly doesn’t change the promises made.
Memory won’t fail me, even if I’ve failed it. For better or for worse, I hold to my commission.
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