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Forgetting is not the worst thing. Remembering is not the worst thing either. The worst thing is when you have forgotten, and then you remember. It catches you out. You forgot for a moment, a day, a week, a month, but the effect is the same each time you remember. You feel it rushing back around your lymphatic system, and you remember the hurt. And there is a part of you that thinks, perhaps the pain is optional now? What might it be like to live without it? This is treachery. You hate yourself for it.
I measured the stanzas through my fingers like a rosary, recited their odd sounds in my head, painted endless unfinished series of images of the garden and the bed of herbs, the riverbank of shining mud, the pebbles in the stream bed lit like jewels, the banks crowded with young children in their purgatory white gowns. I followed the dreamer out of the garden down the bottom gate along the river, and woke back in the garden to start my journey over again.
There is simply the horror of forgetting, and then remembering. She does not want to leave any of her children behind. She wants to love them all, but one of them is on the other side of that river, and she cannot reach him.
She was not planning to leave us. She loved us. The impulse that drove her out of the door and along the river was not abandonment. It was love for her lost son. The current that took her under
the bridge and out into open water was the flood of memory running like poison through her body, the dreadful cold rem...
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She was happy. That was the trouble. She was so happy that she forgot to be sad.
how could you forget me? How dare you be happy? And she was too tired and too unguarded and joyful to have any defence against it. It tore her from her happiness and sent her to the river and held her face under the water.
They never found a note. They didn’t need to. Everything she left us was a note. The songs she left in my head, the fairy tales, skipping rhymes, conversations with the dead.
‘Hey, be careful with that, if you take it apart you won’t be able to put it back together!’ it
