2021 Week 37: Memories Are Curious Things

Memories are curious things. Sometimes they masquerade as thoughts, feelings, or images, without revealing themselves as memories. Sometimes they come to mind and seem relatively meaningless, other times they overwhelm consciousness and cast us back into a vividly remembered past. They emerge into consciousness from somewhere else and give us pause for thought.

Sigmund Freud

I am back in my Mum's flat that once was mine too. I am back, learning how to be here with the traces of her existence. How not to break every time the memories of the moments we spent here together flood in. It was my Mum's home for so long that I forgot what it was like before she moved in. When I lived here on my own and called this place my home. I am now trying to learn how to share it with my Mum without falling into pieces. It is the hardest thing I have had to face in my life.

Memories Are Curious Things
I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.
Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that’s wide and timeless.
So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a gravesite
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots
embrace:
a dream once lost
among sorrows and songs.

Rainer Maria Rilke

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