january 26 tbd
Sometimes things you learn in childhood get locked away in some recess of your brain that never weakens over time. A dumb factoid, a person's laugh, a formative experience —— something like that gets in there and you'll forget the shape of your lover's ass before you forget that today is Wayne Gretzky's birthday and, as he was born on January 26, 1961, he is 65. There's no reason for me to retain this information (which I most likely read on the back of a hockey card in like, 1986) and yet it's written on a thousand bleach white billboards in my brain in jet black 128-point Helvetica.
Trauma kind of works the same way, I think. We don't quite ever forget the bad things that happen to us, do we. And while not every bad thing we experience becomes a deep wound, sometimes a bad thing will happen and you'll know immediately, in that moment, that everything you understood about life, the world, and whatever else has changed in an irreparable fashion. Top Dollar said that childhood is over when you know you're gonna die, and when I heard those words as a 15-year-old at the Cedarbrae 8 in Scarborough in the early 1990s I really, really felt them. Not because I didn't know I was going to die, but rather because it was riiiiiight around then that I first started to understand that life is both excruciatingly long and blindingly short and that the tension between those truths would inform every moment of every day for the rest of my life.
🌲 gonna
🌼 go
🌱 touch
🌳 grass sleep
🌷 now
Be good to yourself.
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