redux: attachment

Part 1

One year ago yesterday I ran into my sister's former lover. He was sitting in the corner of a small coffee shop on King Street (downtown Boone's main thoroughfare) and from the moment I walked in something seemed familiar about him.

"Did you used to live in ____?" he asked.

I recognized the Kentucky in his voice, and somewhere in the back of my mind lights began lighting up one after another: cigarettes, turntables, jealousy and anger.

"Yes," I answered.

photograph of Ryan Adams with coffee

(a short conversation followed

i did not tell him i

once wrote a poem for him)

Looking back now, I wonder about the significance – if any – of our meeting. I do not believe in coincidences; to do so requires that one reject not only the primacy, but even the existence of karma.

Part 2

This afternoon, one year ago, I went to a small storage shed on the north end of the county. Inside were approximately 4000 comic books and my dead grandmother's belongings.

photograph by Stephanie Schneider

(

i remembered

were not there.

some of the things

there

were not remembered.

)

I made what will presumably be my last visit to that same shed two weeks ago. There was a cigar store Indian, a piano, and an oil stain on the floor. Only two of these things belonged to me, and I gave one of them away twice in as many days. The piano now sits in a three bedroom house overlooking a lake.

Part 3

It is neither letting go, nor the thought of letting go. It is the inability to reconstruct a memory that might explain the things I saw; it is the inability to imagine a memory that might make sense of the things I did not.

photograph of a photograph by Patricio Reig

?

?

?

artifact

or

memory

?

?

?

I wrote two-thirds of this one year ago. It is curious to see which of these memories still have emotional resonance and which of them have been relegated to the realm of "things that merely happened"... if such things can even be said to exist at all.