fragile, pt. i

 Lately I've been thinking about people I haven't quite forgotten, but parts of them are fading away, merging with someone else--a woman whose name might be Sam, a man whose face belongs to someone else, but every time I try to make it resolve into the right one my memory rebels. "That isn't right. You're looking for this other man's face." And it's wrong, it's always wrong, but this person, however often you saw them and interacted with them, have faded away. Memory is fragile like that.

What makes it all the stranger is knowing those memories are still locked away in there, somewhere. Memories never really go away, they just get misfiled; what you're really forgetting is how to access what you need. (And, of course, how every time you access a memory it changes. How fragile even the most indelible memories we have must be.)

And somewhere out there someone right now is struggling to remember my name, or my face, or even why I lingered in their memory, what strange thing has prompted me to resurface in their memories. It takes so little for us to drift apart, and even less for the threads that tie us together, the memory of a shared history, to dissolve, brushed aside like so many cobwebs.

a prelude for august (scenes from an apocalypse, cont'd)

Today it rained. Not the sad sprinkle that happens from time to time in the Seattle summer (though that happened, too), but a real rain, reminiscent of a fall rain. The whole day felt like a promise of autumn: windy, with rain and cloud cover, and cool enough that jackets started coming back out. A refreshing change from the heat, and a rare event this early in August, when summer's grasp on the world is unrelenting.

The pandemic continues. Numbers are stagnating here in the city, downtown has neither increased nor decreased in activity. And with no meaningful change in policy seeming imminent, now more than ever the pandemic feels like it will last forever, the worst of both worlds.

Meanwhile the country continues its descent into fascism, with secret police disappearing protesters and local leaders doing everything except actually stop this sort of behavior. The president has openly declared that he would like to delay the election and has repeatedly refused to publicly state that he will accept the results of the election if he loses. And our local police, of course, continue to brutalize protesters without provocation, escalating tension even further.

The rain today reminded me just how fragile everything is--even that endless, stagnant weather that characterizes summer can vanish in an instant. And though it seemed to offer us a promise of autumn, that promise, too, is fraught with frailty. It could be taken away without warning, without provocation, and the oppressive heat of summer could linger on far longer than this brief glimpse would have us suspect.

This month's theme is "fragile." I wish we weren't all feeling so fragile right now.