ain't that something worth writing about

memory's a game we've got no choice but to play, holding onto moments momentarily our own and when we blink we tend to miss them and we miss them though we never had them in the first place. we can take a picture but the lens steals a bit for itself some part of the time in time we'll come to try and recall and we'll put our heads against the wall and ask to go back but to no avail because it's all a one way forward flow we've just got rear view mirrors and all's closer than it appears or maybe it's the other way around but it doesn't really matter, really. time escapes usor we escape time or however we choose to part time doesn't care, doesn't have a heart to be broken by anything or anyone, isn't that a lonely thing? smile through the tears, we do, it's good to feel a little. forgive me if i've run off course i must be in a real right state thinking i'm so eloquent when i stutter, i'm a little crazy but hell we're all a little out of control, control, that illusion we cling to in our ocean 'til it dissolves or evaporates and we drown, or, we trust the tides. who am i to write this all down? just a girl on a train playing the memory game.

You look best dressed in happiness.

A little girl jumps up and down on her parents' big queen sized bed.  Compared to her bunk bed, she's jumping up and down on an enormous sea of pillows.  She's allowed to jump on the bed when her mother's around, 'I'll catch my little monkey before she falls,' she always hears.  She wouldn't jump on the bed without her mother around anyway; what's the point?  She likes her mother's attention perhaps even more than the sensation of her curly blond locks bouncing up and higher than her whole body does while she is free and airborne. 

There's a skylight in her parents' room, so she always makes sure to jump in the center of the bed, as if she's jumping into the sky, like she's taking off to fly.  Today the sky is like a hundred lines, all different shades of purple and blue and a few streaks of yellow.  It all blends together, gorgeous and pastel, and she imagines that if she jumped into it, she'd create ripples in the plum, lilac, powder blue and indigo, making a design like the pretty edges on the dessert plates she's seen in fancy restaurants.  She wants to dive in so badly, like nothing she's ever wanted before or could ever imagine wanting in her lifetime.

She sat down, or rather, bounced and landed with her feet swinging off the side of the bed.  She looked at her mother, blue eyes meeting blue and asked, "Where's the top of the world?"  "The highest place you stand," her mother replied, bemused.  "Well, how can I get there?  Have you ever been there?"  Her mother had an expression on her face that the girl couldn't recognize.  After a few moments she said, "If you believe."

Later that night the girl had vivid dreams.  First she was tiny - so small that the lillies of the valley looked like huge church bells.  She climbed to the highest bell, peered over, and all of a sudden she was on top of an oak tree.  She looked up and when she looked back down she was on the wings of a nightengale and she closed her eyes only to open them and see she was on a mountain peak looking down at the moon's reflection in the water.  She stared at the moon, and in that moment, woke up. 

She walked into the kitchen to find her mother drinking coffee and reading the paper before she had to leave.  Her father had already left for work.  She sat down next to her mother and drank milk out of her favorite mug, pretending it was black coffee like her mother's.  "What if you can't make it to the top?  What if you never stand at the highest place?"  That same expression.  "You just have to believe, baby girl."

That little girl grew into a young woman; she went through the trials and tribulations of being a teenager, went to college, started smoking, quit smoking, travelled, fell in love, wrote a book, adopted a puppy, got married, bought a small house, and always made it home for holidays with her family.  She had a baby girl of her own whom she named after her great grandmother, and who had the same blue eyes as her mother and grandmother.  When she brought the baby home, her mother gave her a book.  The cover was black, and inside were pages upon pages of her childhood - photos, poems, trinkets, dried flowers - all the way up to the present.  The last page was a photo taken when she must have been just born.  Next to it was written, in her mother's perfect cursive, "This, my baby, is the top of the world."

mice, amongst other things.

One of the tasks I have been assigned to is cleaning out the basement of the Loyola Nachbar Huis.  I did not know there was a basement in the Loyola Nachbar Huis.  The basement of the Loyola Nachbar Huis is terrifying.

The stairs are creaky, and it's this ancient looking corridor with doors on the left and right that enter into more rooms that are dark, cold, and smell pretty funky.  It reminds me of a prison or something from the middle ages; I expect to see a man holding his arm out from behind bars with a bone attempting to entice the dog with the keys around its neck to come over.  

I start working at 6 am because it is so hot in Belgium and my delicate body cannot handle manual labor in extreme temperatures.  What is glorious about this job is the fact that I can roll out of bed, put on some clothes, have a cup of coffee and walk downstairs to work.  So anyway, I walk all the way downstairs to work in the basement.  I'm carrying up boxes, broken toilet seat covers, old computers and awkwardly shaped bags filled with god knows what.  But I'm also carrying up boxes and boxes of just...people's stuff.  It's all from years ago...10 or 15 years ago, all belongings people left, perhaps intending to come back and collect.

I was simply carrying up the boxes until I worked my way to what I'll call the 'damp area.'  Word to the wise, if one tries to pick up a cardboard box when the bottom has been eaten away by moisture and time, it will break.  The contents will spill everywhere.  If you're lucky like me, a huge dead mouse/rat will fall at your feet and its surviving children will scamper away from you further into the creepy corridor.  After jumping up and down yelping a few times, I disposed of the dead mouse and proceeded.  The next bag contained a fur coat (which, after the aforementioned experience, appeared to me at first glance as a mutant super rat), and a few beer glasses.  The other boxes contained various things...old papers, files, books, a few pictures, a few geodes...keepsakes.  I wonder about the people who left these things.  I picked up a colored pencil drawing from one of the boxes...its ripped edges tell me it came from a sketchbook.  A pretty landscape graces the page, a blue sky strewn with clouds...its very pretty, and I wonder, why'd this person tear it out of the book?  And why did he/she keep it?  Why didn't he/she come back for it?

Its funny to be going through other people's things.  I'll never know who this person is, but I've got a piece of his/her sketchbook hanging on my wall because I think it's pretty.  I know that life isn't about material things, you know, that 'the things you own end up owning you.'  But nevertheless, I'm fascinated by belongings.  I find it interesting, the items people choose to keep, to hold onto.  I'm touching things that a while ago, people possessed, wanted to keep.  It's like a little connection across time.  Every box could tell me a story, if I wanted it to.