Artifacts

I have these artifacts of people that I once knew, or wanted to know. It's hard to say if I ever succeeded in knowing someone. This could be a way of saying I did not succeed in knowing myself, or that I lost myself in the process, the attempt; gave it all away piecemeal in objects and expressions and minute exchanges of feeling. How strange it is to think that we are remnants of the past, coupled with tenuous bonds to the small treasures that litter our lives, keep us tethered to memory.

I've been told it's an ailment to keep such things as gifts, to fill up spare drawers with knick-knacks and notes impressed with faded writing. Stores of memory, rooms of universes hidden away; but it is not an attempt to hide anything. Where else can things be put but somewhere? Somewheres which lapse into invisibility, my sight can't hold it all where it should be always present, always the most important thing in my mind, my life. We rely on order as a method of keeping rather than hiding. Rummaging through, slipping into a state of remembrance–a wilted blue bookmark with the words FATHER printed on it in bold black. Who is this? Who is haunting me?

Was it my uncle who lent me some books, contained in the leaves of which I found that slip of destiny? No. That was later. But look how my mind conjures him! I did use that bookmark to save my place in his volumes, I am sure of that. See how I gave him the title, FATHER, when that's not what he was, or is. That too a possibility my mind has conjured. It is not a lie but a possible reality. See how it elaborates the matrilineage, musters possibility where before were the brute facts of relation; a slippage, a replacement of man by man that disavows the logic of time, consummation, and progeny.

My Father was a man. And, like all men, he pushed away every person who had ever cared about him. His family was what remained.