Memories

Why does the memory of some people you love never fade away? Do the dead really die? Or maybe they just live on in the minds of those they love, forever lingering on!

The only difference is that you cannot visit them physically.

That familiar lane is a dead-end now, it’s just someone else’s house there. You ring the bell, the face you were expecting there at the doorway, isn’t there. You dial the number from your memory, waiting for that amicable voice to caress you like it used to. But it’s a robotic voice that answers, cold and indifferent as the reality. Nothing seems the same and yet everything is still the same. Someone just left foot prints in the sand.

Sometimes when you wake up suddenly from a deep slumber, you stare at the darkness and wonder what woke you up at that odd hour? It was them. Their memory. They visit you then, float into the dark room, sit on your bed, look at you and wait for you to go with them into their memory. Each time it is a small splinter, something tucked away, already fading, like an old yellowing paper fragile to touch, and with the writing almost illegible. And you lie awake hearing their happy thoughts and eventually fall asleep. In the morning you think it was a dream and sweep it out, attending to mundane rituals of life.

 

Sometimes on hot humid afternoons, with the electricity gone, you drift into a room, open the cupboard full of odds and ends, things kept there for no apparent reason. Things you were meaning to sort out and throw. You find them then, old photographs. They fall like dry dead leaves, soundless, right at your feet. Wave upon wave of colourful memories pick you up and carry you to your yesterdays. Memories settle upon you like dust. You hear the once familiar voices, the intimate smells, see them there right in front of you! You smile at the sight of them, your vision turns blurry, tears pour out, and then a stabbing pain starts to grow somewhere in your chest. You cannot breathe, gasping and struggling you let it go, brush away the cobwebs, rush out, taking refuge in daily chores.

The dead never die. They just live on in the minds of those who they had loved. Waiting in the shadows. Waiting to be remembered. They live on in those memories.They come alive when you remember. They visit you when you are alone- Sit beside you and share forgotten moments. Bookends by Simon & Garfunkel says it all-

"Long ago . . . it must be . . .

I have a photograph

Preserve your memories

they’re all that’s left (of) you."