memory
When I was reading Anne Carson's The Glass Essay two years ago, this one part stood out:
It stayed with me because I was asking the same questions myself. Recently, however, I've found myself answering her. If the sum of all memories, grief, and grudges intact was one— then maybe we can carry small fractions from time to time, and a friend can help carry another fraction, and your therapist takes a fraction, and your plant could take a fraction too, so can the oven where you bake a cake and forget about it for some time.
“In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Có nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me?
I miss you more than I remember you.”
Ocean Vuong,
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Hanif Abdurraqib,
for all the dogs who barked at me on the sidewalks in connecticut
“I'm like you,' he said. 'I remember everything.'I stopped for a second. If you remember everything, I wanted to say, and if you are really like me, then before you leave tomorrow, or when you’re just ready to shut the door of the taxi and have already said goodbye to everyone else and there’s not a thing left to say in this life, then, just this once, turn to me, even in jest, or as an afterthought, which would have meant everything to me when we were together, and, as you did back then, look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name”
André Aciman,
Call Me by Your Name
