eulogy for a band, 12 years later

most of us, most of the time, think of memory as a possession. it is something we keep, something we treasure, something we hold on to. we string them together one after another, and eventually the stack grows large enough for us to say, in all sincerity, "this is what my life was like..."

(parentheses are important)

this is what my li(f)e was like...

but days have memory, too, and more often than not, we find ourselves capitulating to the arrow of time. this led me to wonder this morning: how does this day remember me? in an old journal i found a fragment of the answer:

26 October 1998 - 14 August 1999

this is what i wrote, twelve years ago today:

Of all the things I’ve ever missed and all the things that never were this one meant the most. In love in lust in hate in rhyme; out of tempo and gas and patience and time. Two fell in love, one fell out more scars than I care to count; searching for a singer that would never appear. Selling short in lieu of out, working hard to make it work— I’d like to blame it one the name. Half of us couldn’t play, some still can’t I used to think we didn’t care enough now I think we loved it too much. We didn’t need a singer, we had five; we didn’t need to become what we already were. I guess nobody can play forever.

[lapse]

except this isn't what's on the paper. what i actually wrote was even less sophisticated (which is to say more honest) than this. the band i had started my first year of college was breaking up; the relationship i had started my first year of college was breaking up. then, as now, the two had become so intertwined as to be virtually indistinguishable:

author and singer

could the picture be any clearer? it was taken at a small outdoor arena in Winston-Salem, and out of all the dozens and dozens of shows we played, it is the only photograph i have. one yawn, one stare, two metal bracelets and a watch that refuses to stop pushing us into the future.

can this image do justice to the words that followed?

can the words do justice to the tears that came next?

can the tears do justice to what this image means to me now?

that's the difference between my memory of the day, and the day's memory of me. in our search for meaning, we can edit what happened and reconstruct circumstances and switch from 1st to 2nd person accounts of how these events impact the nature of our being. we can make sense of the mistakes we made and understand our actions in the wake of all that followed.

but the day does none of this to us.

the day's memory of me is fixed, and there is a one page eulogy, written on 23 November 1998, to a band i loved dearly. on the next page there is an apologetic poem written to the woman in the picture. i can read the words, i can smell the paper...