A mostly hidden blog by Mechanical Grace.
When I was 8 or 9 I did a messy, free-form painting, the type that starts with beautiful colors but ends up a brownish tragedy. Still, small flashes of color remained. When I looked at the abstract mess after it had dried, I noticed a tiny shape that looked remarkably, precisely, like a small house, perched on a ledge. Suddenly the chaotic whorls became a cliff face, balancing this little house, and the grayish yellow strip across the top of the page, an odd-colored sky. Looking more carefully I found people, other little buildings, a horse. I marveled at having created such an objective reality, not because it was an accident-- on the contrary, I tried to forget that-- but rather because it seemed such an accomplishment to have achieved that impossible magic, verisimilitude. I kept the painting in the closet and would look at it in private, feeling unreasonably proud, and engrossed in the story I'd hidden in my own painting. I never expected anyone else to see the things I saw, and I still don't, but I work more intentionally now, so you never know...
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How can the past be so changeable? How is it that an experience— a weekend, in this case— that brought me joy can later be made wrong, and by someone else? Or was the wrongness there all along, just ignored for the sake of ease and wishful thinking? Probably, I guess. It’s easier to see, in retrospect, that the affections it brought me were only ever lukewarm, and always held lightly, and with ambivalence.
In any case, one of my warmest stories now has a bitter ending—and this is long after I thought it ended happily. Should I be able to keep the memory warm in my heart anyway? I always try to see things in the best light possible, but when a dearly shared experience becomes a hated memory for one person, how can the other continue to hold it dear? A memory ruined is a cruel loss.
I’m pretty sure that someday I will feel its goodness again, that as the memory grows more distant it will grow less equivocal. That just seems awfully far away at the moment.
