Memory

Anxious by nature, my thoughts tend to run rampant through an overstimulated nervous system.  My nights are full of images, worries, replays of the days events.  Sleep is peppered with hours of laying awake, ruminating over the past and future.  Last night I chased after memories, nervously pursuing them through the dark.  The more frantic my attempts to recall them, the more elusive they became.  My father died after years of dementia.  When it first started he told my sister, “Something is stealing my memories.”  That statement haunts me, frightens me.  Like my father in so many ways, I wonder how much of my forgetting is age and how much might be a foreshadowing.

Memory is a trickster, a friend, a teacher.  It comforts, chides, runs away laughing as my empty hands reach out for it.  Through the soft, dark folds of my mind I reach out, feeling for the texture of it.  There are so many convolutions, so many dead ends.  A complex labyrinth of thoughts and emotions that ignite a web of neurons, each  with an intricate connection to another.  I get lost easily in the stories there and wonder at the enormity of each constellation of stored experience.  It is frightening as the wiring begins to fail and the lights begin to wink out, one by one.