gran text memory

one of these days i'm going to start making a note of the mornings when i wake up and i can't hear anything in my right ear, it happens enough...

i was just sat playing T's piano and my mind wandered off to a situation i'm in and the possible positions people hold within it, kind of thinking about power, the power people hold by what they say or don't say... the kind of fantasy which i could do without, doesn't move me forward, often i wake from such a dream by looking at what i'm doing, why i'm putting certain words in people's mouths in my mind, what part of me is validated through it... almost always something, these dreams that come almost unbidded.

anyway, i realise that mornings when i can't hear in my right ear i'm more prone to this kind of drifting off, it almost feels like being on drugs, a certain distance from reality, from the present moment, and this made me think of my gran, my dad's mum, who was sharp as a pin most of her life but who got some kind of dementia in her last years.

i don't know how much this is true but i always thought it was because she was gradually getting more and more blind, and more and more deaf, her grip on the present moment getting less and less, accompanied i guess with something happening to her mind, one christmas she came to us and it seemed that she'd crossed over a line, she was no longer quite the same person, certain things would set her off talking as though she was living through other situations, things that had upset her maybe decades before, it was wierd for us, i thought at the time that she would probably die soon, her previous character had been so strong, this weak person she'd become (in my perception) surely couldn't survive, but she lived on for 3 or 4 years, she is the sadie of sadie's gone which i improvised back then when she died.

i suppose i'm thinking about myself, how this could happen to me, unimaginable though it is now, and then tracing the different kinds of awareness, of lived reality that we walk through, from the drifting off to the sharply present, that bit in mrs dalloway that says it so well where she looks at herself in the mirror and feels herself tightening, hardening to a diamond to greet the others... hang on... no i can't find it,

i woke up today to my new phone arriving, last night i was looking at the text messages i've accumulated and wondering whether they lived on the SIM card or the phone, when i plugged my SIM card in to the new phone would i keep them or lose them?

once i'd got the new phone i went back to bed, too late last night copying down phone numbers, i woke to a text from catalan E, a response to the tiny piece of neruda i'd sent her yesterday, and it is the only text message in my phone, i lost all those other ones,

and it's no bad thing, much as i love holding on to certain things and the memories that they link to, i'd horded all the text messages i'd recieved on the day of the bombing for example, that community that sprang up immediately making sure everyone you could think of was alright,

after me & P were no more i went through all the text messages from her i'd been keeping and deleted them, other than this lovely one today all of catalan E's texts are no more, except in my mind,

melancholy for sure, but a step towards the bright present moment, those memories will have to live without their digital helpers...

x