Some things I don’t remember at all. My first kiss. My first date. I don’t remember a lot of my life. Not the way you remember yours.
I remember photographs of events, but not the actual event.
Sometimes I think that I made the whole thing up.
All of it.
Then, tentwentythirty years later I run into someone who was there, in that snapshot moment and they say, Yes, that’s what happened. Yes, it was exactly like that. Or they don’t say anything because maybe they blinked too sometimes. Or they look at me like I’m crazy because they remember it a whole ‘nother way completely.
There are things I know, the way I know about Columbus or the Kennedy assassination, but I don’t technically remember, because, like I said, I wasn’t actually there.
That’s how my life is. I’d blink and days would disappear. Even when I knew where I was, I wasn’t really there. I left my baggage in the lobby, but I was gone, baby, gone. Checked out. I know the stories, but they happened to that other Jodi while I watched from the back side of the looking glass. I shouldn’t be held responsible, because I wasn’t actually there.
I don’t remember not one single thing from my own eyes. I remember from the eyes of the other me, the one who stepped out, stood in the shadows, sat next to me in the cabs, lounged on the couch in the corner and watched with no reaction at all. To anything. No matter what was going down. From the safety of the shadows I watched my life just happen– the good, the bad and the ugly. Even in a room by myself, I stood in a corner, watching to see what I would do next….
Word is you remember the things that are important to you. I think I remember the things that changed me, even if they didn’t seem important at the time.
I remember taking my first hit of cocaine (Hotel Earle, 1976),
snorting my first bag of dope (Mardi Gras bathroom, 1981)
and turning my first trick (Floyd Simpson, February 1978).
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Posted October 29, 2009 at 9:00 am, filed under the diary and tagged blink, drugs, the abyss. Bookmark this post. Follow any comments @ RSS feed for this post.
