Episodic Memory Hard Drive

 

One still needs to gear up to come sit on the balcony in July; I don’t recall when it was last this cold for this long in the summer.

The soil is so soft and wet from the constant rain the county worker’s lawnmower leaves large trails of brown on the green, as if the entire vast lawn is suddenly striped.

I was given some hard advice about you. I have always been headstrong, but the advice I got has given me pause.

The worst damage from the storm was the age-old aspen ripped from the ground in one fell swoop, with the roots now exposed and an enormous chunk of soil still attached to them, with the majority of the tree now in Lake Pyhä. The sight was simultaneously devastating and magnificent.

The littlest damage was my scarf leaving my hiking provisions bag unobserved as I was down there on my walk, my smoky pink silk scarf, I loved it so. A token tribute to the gods of weather, most likely also now in Lake Pyhä, since I followed loosely the bike trail, that is my hike now, and it was right by the water where the wind was strongest, so much so in fact that my sneakers got wet from the spritzing waves.

The gull tending to his nest on one of the old timber rafting foundations by the lake would not budge, but sat on his post like he was glued there, staying surprisingly immobile while the gale howled all around us.

I wasn’t the only silly duck to turn a blind eye to some serious advice to stay indoors while the elements were rampaging, either; the metal festival I had no idea was happening was starting, and it took me a while to get with the program as to why we were all, single-mindedly, headed in the same direction, me in my shin-length floral skirt that kept billowing in the wind exposing my colorful Nikes and wearing my eternal Yankees cap, and the majority of the city’s hard rock lovers walking leisurely in band teeshirts and full regalia towards the venue.

“Ma’am, yes, it is a music festival, the whole area is sealed today, can you take an alternative route, for through here you shall not pass?”

The gate guard was not really quite as Lord-of-the-Rings as I make her out to be, but the gist of the short discourse was the same.

I circled the entire festival area and passed the reflecting pool eventually, one of the prettiest spots in Tampere, always reminding me of Miss Havisham’s decadent garden in ruination and decay where Pip and Estella practiced their dancing – my first experience with Dickens’ Great Expectations came as Alfonso Cuarón’s exceptionally wonderful and atmospheric movie adaptation, and while I did read the original work and was after great hardships able to accept the original name for the protagonist, I find Cuarón’s take on the story still the best and most captivating I have ever come across, and the main players will always be, in my mind, Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow, with Anne Bancroft as the lovelorn soul destroyer lady of the house, and Robert de Niro as the surprisingly generous convicted murderer.

 

When I buy apricots I think of my lover, who likes them and always gets them when they are in season.

Dried apricots remind me of my father, who loves them and at the farmers’ market always hunts the sourest ones to buy.

Strawberries remind me of my mother; our strawberry patch in Pyhäniemi, mother removing the stems in the kitchen with her hands all red and fixing me a bowl of strawberries with milk and sugar, a family treat.

Cherries used to remind me of my childhood best friend, but the connection has faded, and it is no longer an instant association.

Green kiwi fruit remind me of Roberts, but only if it is a brand from New Zealand, the country where she got married; otherwise it only reminds me of the time when I cut into one that had gone so rancid seeing it put me off green kiwi fruit for good.

Bananas remind me of M; the mashed banana in the bottom of his bag after a hot day spent in Le Quartier Latin and the Left Bank in general, and how the fruit had rubbed into the canvas causing the whole bag to reek of banana for weeks.

Gooseberries remind me of Willow. Gooseberries, and pomegranate.

 

Let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that while I was on my walk not only did I mysteriously lose my scarf without even realizing I had lost it until I was almost back home, but that going gung-ho like that in the nature after the weathermen had urged everyone to stay inside, I happened in a place where a tree, suddenly and without warning, fell on top of me, cracking my skull.

What would pour out of there, exactly, besides blood?

I have been bleeding from the mouth, still, every day. I look like Laura Palmer on the very verge of losing her life in Fire, Walk with Me.

I was given some hard advice about you, and that advice has given me pause.

I was handed a bouquet of fragrant mint, and some hard advice.

Mint, and apples, and rhubarb; these remind me of when I was for a short time ruler of the kingdom, but like all posts of high profile significance, extreme urgency, and red alert diplomatic clearance, this, too, was a non-permanent fixture, and now I have returned to work as a cleaning woman, a short-order cook, a dish washer, a bar keep.

“But she’s a cocktail waitress! Don’t tell me you’re marrying a cocktail waitress?”

If a tree fell on me, let’s say one of the gorgeous pines in the communal, well-kept woods I love so, preferably a pine if I was to have any say in it, the pine is my favorite tree, and my sacred prayer tree, I share this with Willow, a love for the pine; what would come gushing out after my head cracked open?

 

After my hike I went through my provisions bag to check if anything else had gone missing, but everything else was accounted for: my journal, my book, my pencil case, my hankies, my buscard, my small bottle of emergency water.

What would spill out of my head if it were to happen so?

All the advice I have received in my life, none of which taken.

An endless parade of movie quotes, impressions of books I have loved and artworks I have seen, hundreds upon hundreds of moments of disagreements and reconciliations with my loved ones.

The lyrics to both Like a Virgin and Like a Prayer, and to most of Depeche Mode’s back catalogue, and The Smiths, and The Beatles, and because I am a child of the 80’s, also the lyrics to Sabrina’s Boys (Summertime Love). That is, Sabrina, no last name, not Carpenter.

 

After checking the contents of my bag I took a shower, then I took a moment to myself, and it was joyous and fantastic, not a Quimera Negra at all, then I made an extravagant meal for just me: pasta with Japanese eggplant and spring onions and garlic and bufala, and proceeded to have three helpings with several small glasses of Rosé. I like vintage glassware; I do not enjoy huge modern goblets where one can pour half the bottle at once.

The places I consider holy that no longer exist anywhere else than inside my mind.

Where I have lived.

Obi the dog with his brown and white fur and the way he looks at me, our discussions over evening snacks on important matters, and how hard I laughed when he demanded to watch Rambo with me in bed that time. In a way, my love for him, in its immediacy and utter simplicity, surpasses my love for all other living things; mostly when I think of him, smoke gets in my eyes.

The almost interminable hours of solitary walking with my thoughts.

My work. These blog pieces, my poetry books, existent and otherwise, and the almost finished manuscript for a novel in Finnish that caused so much racket back in the day. All pretty much useless stuff I still hold in the highest importance and the highest value, in fact, I consider them the reason of my existence. I believe it was Annie Dillard who said that a writer had better make her peace with the fact that no one except the writer herself will ever care too much about her work; it is not life-altering or life-saving stuff like being a doctor, it isn’t even kind of useful like being a locksmith or a welder or a cashier; when one of these fails to show up at her post, it will be noticed, but if a writer fails to produce a work, no one cares in the slightest. Whether the work is ever finished or not is important only to its creator and, thus, it would be the height of hubris to lift oneself up into the pantheon of the Greats, though this is what almost every writer inevitably does, myself included.

My journals, and my specific instructions for Willow as to what do to with them and where the key is.

My love for people. How much I have loved and how difficult it has been, invariably, to allow for it to show for more than a few minutes at a time. I remember everything. Their voices, the way their skin smells, the texture of their hair, their mannerisms and idiosyncrasies, the way they move and their speaking patterns and the way they looked at me when they were annoyed with me and the way they looked at me when they were liking me.

The flowers; the violets, the peonies, the different kinds of roses, the forget-me-nots, the blue bells.

How I have never been able to keep an ivy alive to save my life, and I did buy my fair share of them before facing that I would never develop a green thumb.

My love for old things.

What swimming in a natural body of water feels like. What moss feels like, or touching tree bark with bare hands. Who likes which fruits and berries. How inconsequential I sometimes felt, and at others how pivotal. My extraordinary dream world. Reading. Writing. Your face. The sound of snow. Swallowing the first mouthful of rose jam I made myself. Stepping in hot tar by accident.

My favorite bird sounds. My love for silk and yellow kiwi fruit and pears. The entirety of Gilmore Girls. Falling asleep after a hard day’s work. My pencil collection, dating all the way back to childhood. How an especially intense orgasm makes me laugh outloud. How discussing in the car with Willow my first experience ejaculating while masturbating caused for us to get so caught up in the conversation we missed the exit ramp and drove 30k in the wrong direction, not even noticing we had veered off course until the topic had been exhausted.

Paris streets before the pandemic.

My grandfather, and never knowing whether he would be ashamed or proud of how I have chosen to live my life.

Seeing Die Hard for the first time in my life when I was a kid, and The Terminator, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, and When Harry Met Sally… and Stand by Me, and Aliens, my first one of the franchise and how the xenomorph became a stable in my cabinet of horrors as well as childhood play.

How I used to dance before my back, and subsequently my leg, broke.

How bewildered I was when I first saw the video for When Doves Cry, a song my sister adored, when I was seven, not realizing my bafflement was really corporeal arousal from the primal grittiness of the sound and the steaminess of the bath tub and how hot Prince was, and to this day I cannot listen to it without pleasant shudders happening from the sense memory.

Seeing the alien lizard face underneath the peeling human skin in V – Visitors. The opening credits music to Dynasty, and The Twilight Zone, and Ghostbusters.

Listening to Paul McCartney totally succumb to giggles while trying to record And Your Bird Can Sing, a take that has never failed to make me laugh.

How, when the sun is setting and very low in the horizon and the jackdaws take flight from the rooftop, the way they are illuminated from below while flying among the treetops of the park makes them appear otherworldly and foreign, inducing both fear and marvel in the eye of the beholder.

How, had I not died just then, I would have returned to the very same hike trail the next day when the wind had let up, and I would discover my scarf lying on the beach, a little dirty but otherwise okay, a gift back from the gods, figuring they were pleased with the mind game and since I had accepted losing it for good, it didn’t matter anymore anyway, because here I was again, and there is joy in repetition.

 

 

 

 

 

Picture with Obi by Markus Määttänen

Thank you Prince for lyrical input.