Palimpsest

"It’s weird when you realize the person you once told everything to now has no idea what’s going on in your life."
 — Anonymous —

I've been in an odd, unsettled mood the last day or two. Not bad, depressed, or any of that. Just -- different. This is almost entirely due to a changeover that's coming tonight (more on that below). In the middle of it, in an odd coincidence, I ran across the above quote.

It's a true thing, what this quote says. I've been realizing that of all people living (fewer almost by the hour) to whom I could tell everything or who at least understood practically everything about some big part of me have traveled different, ever-branching paths away from me in this dense forest we live in. 

For them I have long since disappeared from sight. To them I am a more-or-less powerful memory artifact, like my grandmother's root cellar, which I last visited nearly sixty years ago. To this day the damp, old-rain, organic smell of fresh-turned black earth instantly returns me there.

That smell of earth becomes an immersive, multi-sense memory, but it recreates a place and time that no longer exists — that house and the cool, dark cellar with its canning jars and rooty potatoes with the dirt still clinging to them have long since become the fill and foundation of an anonymous apartment complex.

Writers often refer to places as entities in a more or less living sense. If that's so, and if places have memories, I wonder if that place thinks that my near-religious experiences with it during those summer vacations so many years ago continue to endure as "knowing" it? As it goes through its years of changes, transformed to just another anonymous chunk of the city and beyond, does that place believe it's still essentially the same, expect that should our paths cross again that we'd instantly connect at that core level as we always had?

Or does the place have a sudden epiphany that the unique knowledge of its soul is only as it was sixty years ago, and that beyond the barest sense of location the once-child knows nothing about its reality now, for all the reality of the near-consuming love and knowledge of every nuance then?

Does it suddenly feel the sadness at the realization that the warm niche of being intimately known by someone, the pool of light that was always assumed to be permanent on the edge of the dark, has guttered and died almost unnoticed?

It wish I had some life lesson here. I don't. It just is, I guess. The Stoics' answer, as always.

All this was brought on by wrapping up my journal, preparing to put a new book of empty pages in my (yes I still love it) leather journal binder. Reading it before I move on is what lead me to the realization that I'm more alone, less known, now than I was in 2014. Heh. A trivial lesson there after all: Have a care what you wish for or work toward. Someday it will come true.

Tonight/Tomorrow is the last/first of the month, and the last/first of the quarter, and a full moon (in fact the last blue moon of the year), and Easter, all in a single bundle and all of which seem to have combined to make a pretty good dividing point between the old and new journals.

This illusion of it being a meaningful time is particularly encouraged by the full moon which continues to exercise an out-sized psychological impact on me even as I understand its utter lack of real-world significance. At the end of the day, it's just physics and cosmology. But even so, I'm crushed under the mass of it in the dreaming dark, rippling reds glowing sullenly like the heart of a dying campfire, roiling slowly and barely glimpsed through the silvered black and white night, slippery on the border between conscious and subconscious, between rational and not.

Primal blood is under only a vanishingly thin layer of civilization and must occasionally be indulged; a fact as true as the mathematics of the moon's orbit.

Also, and vastly more importantly than an invented pileup of calendarish Signs and Wonders, the mundane: I've run out of pages in the old journal, or almost so. I'm down to a couple, and expect them to be gone before morning. This utterly coincidental combination of invented esoterica and mundane real life appeals to a variety of my latent OCD tendencies.

I've had the journal since June 2014 (which longevity is principally due to my less than stellar writing schedule) and I've been through it in some depth today. Notes, quotes, near-diary entries of things, long screams at some of the worst times in my life, and essays on some of the best. Erasures. Annotations. Philosophies. Theories. Corrections.

It's a more or (frequently) less stumble-and-stagger through the timeline of my life. Some of you are prominently there, if not by name (I don't use them) at least by effect. But with the exception of notes and scrawls having to do with story ideas or particular chunks of information I find useful, it is totally NFP (Not For Publication). It's mine, for me, and literally no one else on earth has or will ever read a page in it.

Which, of course, is an interesting question. What do I do with the old one? I want to keep it for me, but if I go tits-up tomorrow, I want it to go into the flames with me. Still working on that. Suggestions welcome, and I'll let you know if I sort it out.

In Our Next Episode:  Facing the scariest thing ever -- a book of empty pages.