The Sea Of Forgetting

It is not easy to let go of those times and let them float away down the river of memory, letting them make their way down to the sea of forgetfulness to be lost on the tides that washes the flotsam of our forgotten moments onto far distant beaches where we will never walk. We want to hold on tight to so much of this world, surround ourselves with every moment, picking over its traces trying to find why memory matters so much.

We have lived too long with too many promises of a world somehow made good; either here and now, or in some place far beyond the here and now where everything will be made right and good.

Fortunately, now we do not believe such hollow promises.

We know there are no heavens and no hells; and we know too that any promised utopia will always crumble into rubble and be lost in the flames of its own contradictions. So we hang on tight to what we have, hoping not a single moment will be prised from our grasp.

We do all we can to take our memories and make them solid, investing them in things that lie outside ourselves: in times, in places, in songs and photographs. Solid proof that we were here, and we were there, and that those moments can never be torn from our tightly gripping hands to flutter on down to that river that flows on to the sea of forgetting.