cradlesong raze i used to believe or halfway hope that anything you wiped out could be restored. that you could sweep a finger across what was gone, touch the place it used to live, brush off whatever sat on top of it, and all the noise you loved and lost would still be there. that even things left unrecorded in this house were captured by a cassette deck on someone else's window_sill. that nothing ever really went away. but life doesn't work like that. everything i've erased without wanting to only still exists in me, in whatever degraded state the flimsy material i was made with will allow. and all those hazy transmissions and waylaid lullabies will leave when i do. those tapes are still the first thing i would save if my house was on fire. even if some of the most important pieces are missing. even if i died trying. at least i'd die with my own life still warm in my arms. 220307 ... Bizzar raze, your writing here reminds me of something my partner says all the time. that when we remember something, we are not remembering the event itself, but are remembering our last memory or the event. i have always enjoyed that thought, and imagine how much more fuzzy the details get each time we turn an event into a memory of a memory of a memory. 220308 ... Bizzar *of the event 220308 ... raze i'm endlessly fascinated by memory. how it's sometimes sharp in the places it should be dull, and weak where we want it to be strong. how a song or a smell or a damaged photograph can bring something back with such force, it feels like we're living through it all over again. how some things disappear and can't be called back. there's a passage from "the_road" by cormac_mccarthy (i'd forgotten i quoted it here nine years ago) about the damage done to a memory each time it's revisited. that's always stuck with me. i know i'm chipping away at some of the old paint i'm trying to preserve every time i write about a moment i want to keep close to me. but i can't stop myself from trying to get my arms around these things, even as they're slipping away. maybe there's beauty in the struggle to hold onto everything that can't be kept. that's what i like to tell myself, anyway. 220308 what's it to you? who go blather from