| Jamais Vu |
[Dec. 14th, 2009|03:54 am] |
I saw your face in a photograph today (as I sometimes do)—but in this one your face is dangerously close to mine. I look at it as if for the first time. Jamais vu. It is a relic of a long forgotten past (it feels this way, even though it is far from true). I see this picture, but I cannot believe it is real, I cannot fathom that it is you and me in this picture together. It makes me feel so hollow that we used to be so close, cheek to cheek in each other’s lives, and now I feel we are more than worlds apart. The distance is immeasurable, unfathomable, and perhaps untraversable. We are too far removed for my memory to bridge. We are islands, adrift at sea and above an angry earth that, determined to separate us, has apparently succeeded. It is like I do not know you—no: it is like I have never known you, and this terrifies me. Feelings are inconstant and malleable, but facts are not; fact says that we were once together, that I once looked to you with a kindness in my heart that has been lost to legend, that there was a time when you were the only thing I felt was worth keeping. So we spent our summer together, making up for time we’d wasted. I don’t assign blame anymore—the times which we spent together more than made up for the times I spent in needing you when you couldn’t be there. Or so I tell myself. But, like the greatest things about us, the pain that defined my youth has all but vanished like a forgotten wonder of an ancient world.
There is so much that I do not remember, so much that I cannot recall. Although now I know that we are different—and my god have we become different (or have we always been?)—I know that at one time these differences were smaller to us than the space between the cheeks of lovers who remember their lives together in photographs that attempt to capture that feeling for us. Oh, how I wish that it could be so! How I wish that we could remember the holding of hands, the shortness of breath, the evenings which melted summer down to the end of its withered wick, and that the coupling of adolescent desires could be captured in a camera or developed in a darkroom—and yet now I know that they are all for naught. I am hollow, and I am ruined. I will ruin again. I am happy now, happy with her--perhaps happier than i have ever been--but this photograph only reminds me of how fragile this happiness is. Is it only a matter of time, a matter of more photographs between now and then, between now and what became of us? How long until I claim another happiness that only pixels will remember? I do not want to see myself in any more photos with familiar strangers. I do not want to keep on destroying and destroying and taking and taking. I do not want to make our mistakes again. God, the only thing I can ever really remember is this fear. I am so ruled by fear. |
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