The moments collected
In oddly matched containers
Chipped Mason jars, heavily figured candy dishes, mixing bowls, test tubes and delicate crystal flutes
They sit on dusty shelves
In empty halls
Where no one ever goes
Each one is filled with a liquid
Sickly yellows, electric blue-whites, cloudy greens, pulsing angry oranges, night-shrouded blacks and crystal clears that smell faintly of salt
Sometimes…when things happen
You open the doors to the deserted palace
You follow your own sooty tracks through the echoing corridors
You find yourself stopping somewhere
To look at a vessel
You don’t want to pick it up but you do
You want to turn and run through the endless galleries, out into the sunlight
But you don’t
You gently swirl the terrible mixture inside
And you are there again
Ensnared in those dark memories
The weight presses about you and you are breathless
Tremors rise in you and the container slips from your boneless hands
That fragile glass decanter, filled to the brim with incendiary liquid
Shatters on the floor and you are so ANGRY
Asking yourself again why these things happened
A terrible blaze ignites from the ghastly elixir
To engulf you again
But you are not consumed
You never are
Only scorched and blackened
You take a step and the ashes gradually flake away
One after the other until you stand outside the doors
You chain them shut again
And you think SOMEDAY, perhaps you can go back inside
Drain each and every bottle
Dust the shelves
Sweep the floors and open the shuttered windows again
To feel the light of the sun
-Jessie Henry
12/16
*Note: Years ago, in reading one of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s Agent Pendergast novels, I came across the concept of the Memory Palace. A Memory Palace is a technique used to boost memory recall by the use of a spatial symbol (i.e. making a journey in your mind through a real or imagined place to help you retrieve specific facts). At some point, the thought bubbled up in my head that instead of that, what if a Memory Palace was a place where one stored away the sad and frightening memories that we wished we could be free of. Unfortunately, these things are still held within us, so no matter how much we wish we could move on or forget, we may still find ourselves sleepwalking back to those terrible times. We scold ourselves later: “Why can’t you just get over this?” “Grow up and live your life!” “Yes, that was terrible and sad, but life goes on.” We trudge away from that haunted place and promise ourselves that we will never go back.
I think we have to give ourselves the grace to understand that if we have a hard time healing from certain things, it is only because we have hearts and emotions. A machine could easily move on from any setback, but is that what we want to be? Stop feeling bad about yourself because sometimes that baggage comes back to you. Every day, rise up and put one foot in front of the other. Those things will lose their grip on you. You survived and you are stronger than anything in those dark containers of memory, I promise.