#memory

“Wear a mask or go to jail” , California, 1918.

People stand together while wearing masks in an effort to protect themselves from the Spanish Flu. The 1918 Spanish flu killed up to 50 million people around the world and has been called “the mother of all pandemics”.

Bill Murray and Carrie Fisher, Saturday Night Live, November 18, 1978.

There is this feeling I get after my heart breaks, metaphorically of course, I do know hearts are muscles and do not break, but when something that felt so real and so infinite ends, I cannot help but feel like my body is physically hurt.

It feels like my ribs are breaking, one after another, in different spots and they keep breaking and breaking, putting more and more pressure on my chest, making it impossible to breathe. I feel the air coming through my nose and never making it down my windpipe because it is being crushed by my chest collapsing into itself. There is sharp pain in my throat when air touches it and soon I cannot breathe at all. My eyes hurt, they are bloodshot, bleeding, blood dripping down my face onto the ground and it hurts. My body is shaking and there is no way to stop it, it moves with every inhale and exhale and even when my chest is broken down and barely gets air through, my body still shakes, my muscles keep cramping, contracting stronger and faster and at some point, my body does not handle it any more. It shuts down. 

Then a new kind of pain begins. There is a headache I can feel right in the center of my forehead. It starts there, where the emotions are controlled, it starts where everything started to fall apart. If feels like every single cell there is shutting down, either dying or slowly burning to death. It almost feels like needles stabbing every single one of them, making the brain unable to control whatever is going on. It moves up and affects my thinking, making me believe there is nothing left for me in the world, making me believe, there is no plan, no future.The pain spreads to the top of my head, makes it unable to move, makes my whole body hurt again, all the ribs breaking, the body shaking, now it gets worse. It affects the vision and makes it even blurrier and all I see is him in front of me, everywhere I look and that hurts even more. 

After my whole brain feels like it is bleeding out and being torn apart, the last part of brain starts to hurt. The little piece of where every perfect memory is stored, where memories of first dates, kisses, ‘I love you’s and so much more, live, that is the part that hurts the most. This little part is the main reason the whole brain is hurting, the only reason my body is breaking. The memory of perfect little moments of time we shared is why breakups make me think there is something physically wrong with me when it happens, because it does affect my whole body, it affects every cell that lives inside me and all of them start hurting at the same time.

tohugomorris:

“The distance between two points increases over time. Disconnecting and fragmenting their connections. This is a painful experience, full of bitterness and resentment that ebbs and flows over memories and nostalgics. But there is a gorgeousness that exists in this like pale watercolours over solid black lines. It will always linger, but it becomes a part of you, for better or worse, keeping you who you are and marking you with scars like brands you can never escape or change but must always grow with. I believe in so many things, but that doesn’t make them passions. So why don’t you tell me who you are?”

–Anne Carson, from “Short Talk On Travelling.“ Short Talks (Brick Books, 1992)

E poi, sistemando una scatola di cianfrusaglie, trovi questo… l’ultima uscita normale, fatta con Anna, Elena, Bea e Rebecca, a caccia di fumettisti e di dolcetti giapponesi, il mondo stava già cambiando e noi non lo sapevamo