Saturday, December 14, 2002

My First Lost Entry

I wrote a beautiful blog tonight, about family and generations shifting forward as children become parents and my mother crying at the loss of her mother when looking at my child in the arms of her mothers sister; about being daddy, and seeing parents turn into someone else's grandparents; about presents and giving and receiving what one really wants; about supper with my parents at the Blue Heron, a 5-star restaurant on the water where an old mill once stood in a small impossible-to-find town.

And then it was gone, and with it my memories. Now anger and frustration fill my brain, and although I ache at the loss of my memories on the goddamnitall screen, I understand in this moment what it is to blog. For all the debate about who and what the blog is for, it took loss for me to see that the blog truly is for the self; that the invisible projected other is incidental after all. For when writing for others, loss means trying again. But here, in the quiet moment of loss, I understand my heart, and it says it cannot be written again; let it go.

I think of Eudora Welty, who wrote, in her short story No Place For You, My Love:

A thing is incredible, if ever, only after it is told -- returned to the world it came out of.

And I know that she is wrong. A thing is incredible when it is told, but it need not be returned to be told -- to return it now would mean reconstructing a reconstruction, moving further from what I felt, moving towards what I wish I could remember I had once said. It is the telling, not the tale, which matters to my heart, and that telling has been told whether it is lost or remains.

And so I choose to keep my lost memories of this evening as incredible. They will remain unwritten, after all.

posted by boyhowdy | 9:31 PM |

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