Do We Fear Disappearance or Are We Aghast at Being Inexact?
“Real memory has more to do with oblivion than with storage. What we forget may shelter us more than what we remember.” - Anne Dufourmantelle
We spend the next two hours alternating between shots and slowly sipped glasses of Kenneth's scotch. Inevitably predictably, our conversations find their way home.“Our memories," Joseph says, “are like a river cut off from the ocean. With time they will slowly dry out in the sun, and so we drink and drink and drink and we can never have our fill."
"Why do you always talk like that?" Kenneth demands.
"Because it is true. And that is the only way to describe it. If you have something different to say, then say it."
Kenneth leans his chair back against the wall. He's drunk and on the verge of falling.
"I will say it," he says.
He pours the last few drops of scotch into his cup and sticks his tongue out to catch them.
"I can't remember where the scar on my father's face is. Sometimes I think it is here, on the left side of his face, just underneath his eye. But then I say to myself, that's only because you were facing him, and so really, it was on the right side. But then I say no, that can't be. Because when I was a boy I sat on his shoulders and he would let me rub my hand over it. And so I sit on top of a table and place my legs around a chair and lean over and I try to find where it would have been. Here. Or there. Here.
Or there."
As he speaks his hand skips from one side of his face to the
other.
"He used to say, when I die you'll know how to tell it's me by this scar. That made no sense but when I was a boy I didn't know that. I thought I needed that scar to know it was him. And now, if I saw him, I couldn't tell him apart from any other old man."
"Your father is already dead," I tell him.
"And so is yours, Stephanos. Don't you worry you'll forget him someday?"
"No. I don't. I still see him everywhere I go."
"All of our fathers are dead," Joseph adds.
"Exactly," Kenneth says.
I stumbled over this passage last night, reading The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu and again I couldn’t carry on for more than two pages.
Memories…
Memories don’t simply evaporate into nothingness like a river cut off from the ocean. They silt, growing more sedimented, accumulating at the bottom of us, or they ferment, turning into something more potent, more volatile—spirit, rum or whisky from a fine distillery. There’s a chance they ossify, calcifying into fixed images. Or they may shapeshift—quietly rewritten each time we recall them, so that what we believe to be remembering is a slow authoring of myth. The memory becomes a palimpsest of something, a truth nested within too many layers of emotion to be exhumed intact. One day, we wake and realise: we are not remembering at all, we are just reciting the story we told ourselves last time. And this—this recitation, the last known version of our longing, a candlelit cartography, remembralume is burning faint and true.
No wonder Kenneth's hand moves from one side of his face to the other, like a child tracing the outline of a half-forgotten constellation; it is the most honest form of grief—tactile, searching, unscripted. To remember truly, one must admit that remembering is flawed, that time doesn’t just pass—it warps, it buckles, it blurs, it drapes itself over the past like a thin, trembling veil stitched from longing and distortion. The scar, once a symbol of irrefutable identification, now floats freely—an anchor that’s come untethered from the seabed, insisting that love once had a face, even if we can no longer sketch it with precision.
Maybe it’s not about accuracy at all, but about intimacy—soul-closeness, not fact-correctness. About the trembling attempt, the halting, stammer-lit reach across time’s fog; about how the very act of trying to remember becomes a form of love—a haptic devotion, a tenderness enacted through the choreography of almosts.
Remembering, affective cartography, a soft-mapping of where someone once touched us, spoke to us, left a dent in our breath, pulse-memory…
I think of the words of Etel Adnan, the Lebanese-American poet and painter, who once wrote:
“I write what I see, and I paint what I am losing.”
This confession, soaked in tenderness and inevitability, that both art and memory are not acts of possession but of farewelling...
To try to remember someone truly—where the scar was, the way they used to sit, the scent of the air after their voice left the room—is not just recollection; it is a holding, as long as we can, against the pull of disappearance.
So we write.
We speak.
We circle the memory like pilgrims of saintscribe. We say “here, or there, or here,” and our hands hover over our own faces, trying to match the past to the present.
We do not remember because we are strong.
We remember because we are devoted.
And even in distortion, even in forgetting, there is something reverent. Something that says: you were once loved enough to leave a shape in me.
To fear forgetting—to ache over it, to speak through it, to write toward it—that is a profoundly human refusal to let our dead disappear into abstraction, to let the memory silt, ferment, ossify, or drift, to let us mislead, to matter, to tell ourselves we still know how to touch it.
Such beautiful and fitting quotes from Dinaw Mengestu and Etel Adnan.