San Francisco in August

I have this day - at the end of October - that I both don't want to remember and can't seem to forget. It is burned in my memory. It holds a different meaning than it used to in light of the things that I have recently been through. In fact - as the years go by - it becomes more painful, as opposed to less. I would have expected the opposite. The pain sharpens while the rationalization seems less clear and it is all mixed with regret and uncertainty about the future. I always hope that the end of October will come and go unnoticed, but it never does.

So years ago - years after the fact - I wrote something, about that day - it was about that day but it wasn't. I had wanted to replace the day with another memory. I just wanted to remember something else. I can only talk about it here on my blog without actually talking about it, so I'll just post the only thing I ever wrote about that day.

August 23, 2003,

She has spoken only to a limited extent about that day in October. And she has certainly never recorded the words, perhaps never even spoken them aloud. The most she has ever been willing to say is right now – that she remembers the smell of the room, the inappropriate conversation between a mother and her teenage son, what she was wearing, and the absence surrounding the days that followed. She remembers the pain like it happened yesterday and she knows that such intensity is reserved for those moments in life we are meant never to forget. And she knows that she did not belong there because she was the only one in that room not crying. She thinks that it is telling, what we choose to remember. The way we sometimes like to carefully select the words believing that what we are recording is a memory with such precision and such accuracy that it is like a photograph – but distorted in its own way. And it is equally as telling, what we choose not to remember, whether out of a fear that the words will not be enough, or perhaps out of a desire to forget the moment altogether. Things unwritten, but conjured up later in a form all their own. Her memories, like all things, are a fabrication.

She says that day is like San Francisco in August – a night unrecorded in history. Unrecorded, because like that day in October, she wanted there to be no distortions and no mistakes. She uses that night in August as a substitution for the day. She remembers the density of the air and the color of the paint – she could tell you what it felt like, as if that same perfect picture of a San Francisco night in August, could make a day never exist.

What has been lost in the space in between? In the days and the pages that are missing? Not everything is as vivid anymore. She has wondered all this time if she had given up her self respect for him, and has concluded, finally, that what was lost upon those nights, is not in fact regained in the morning. The question for her has always been – how to live through the day that you wake up and realize that you are not who you thought you were – and in so many ways.

She is acutely aware now, like on that day in October, just exactly how every moment, every interaction, can change your life. Those split seconds in time in which a choice is made – to utter the words – to reveal the truth – or to keep the secret. A yes, instead of a no.