Memories

 

Memories melting to flow like ravaging mountain streams, cutting gorges in the heart, throwing boulder chunks of my unstable self. And my identity would fall like fragile mountain slopes.

It would feel like the streams were unmaking me. But that was just the beginning. One shouldn’t analyze too early even if the slopes of your identity are falling in avalanches and landslides. They were fragile slopes.

As one will find later, the sand would be transported to fertile plains. The furious streams would acquire the curved gentility of maturity and wisdom in the plains.

The heavily laden stream of consciousness would feel and see the light. It would disburden its loaded self of the sediments, sand, gravel and dust of the painful past. It would flow with ease and comfort; settle down to a reliable identity. It would find its path very fruitful and meaningful—a ripening—so much so that it would be joyful in reaching home, the culmination of its journey, the destination, the bird-footed surrender to the sea’s loving receptive sprawl.

Then the boulders of memories, which were hacked away painfully from your tormented self, would become vapors in the sea. They would ride the fleeting clouds to travel far and wide, drifting with the whims of mischievous winds. They would then forget the former names, dates, enemies, lovers—the specifics—as they float in the formless generality.

But the elemental generalities remain. For nothing gets destroyed completely. It just transforms. They precipitate and again fall onto the ground to do the same, love and hate the same, cry and laugh the same in a new identity, new name, new costume, new belief, new faith, new set-up.

It feels like I’m simply as good as a molecule of water cycling and recycling endlessly. Forever. Here and there in this form and that. A mere turbulence, a tiny span, a brief pause between rigidities and surrender to a larger sprawl. A faint trace of symmetry in the utmost random fabric of eternity. A little cycle within cycles and still bigger cycles. A journey from an icy clog on mountain cliffs to water in the sea to a cloud. Then repetition of the same.

Just a pattern, a momentum, a habit of the unknown. A design born of unknown cosmic caveats. An incident-filled ripple—sometimes oppositional, sometimes collaborative.