Fallible Memory

... and the difficulty of writing about real live people.

In my files I found old emails and MySpace messages between Lorenzo and me, but no records of the many msn chats, nor our public comments on each other's MySpace posts. Also missing were those posts themselves, which had a lot to do with our falling in love with each other. It wasn't only the private exchanges, though they certainly cemented it, but also what we wrote to share with the world.

Even so, some of the emails were long. Once I started going through them, I had a lot of reading – before, during and after blogging our love story here. Though I reported our initial messages verbatim, some other things turned out to be worded a little differently than I'd remembered, e.g. he spoke of older people who might know things rather than 'having a clue'. (But maybe the wording I thought I recalled was somewhere in the missing messages.)

One thing which was much more complex than my recollection of it was the Reiki episode (teaching him long-distance). So I took that out of the blog story altogether. I realised that in any case it wasn't an essential part of that account. 

I at first wrote that we were 'frequently impolite.' I changed it to 'sometimes'. Though it's true there were some hilarious insults and no forbidden words or topics, re-reading the emails I realised that we were in fact very courteous with each other, and careful to address that thing of online communications being easy to misunderstand. 

I didn't want to quote too much of our private conversations; that would feel like a betrayal, a violation. So I feel I am left with an account which tells rather than shows. But so it must be. Writing about real, living people is very tricky as to how much to disclose, particularly when you haven't asked permission. 'Lorenzo' is a pseudonym of course, but it was one he used a lot at that time, known to his friends though not to the world at large.

It's fascinating to me that people seem enchanted by my story, even though it breaks the famous 'show, don't tell' rule. 

I had thought of interspersing the account with poetry. But, after all, I can't share all the poems I wrote to / for / about him at that time. Some of them use his name, and to alter it would muck up things like rhythm and cadence.  (There is also the fact that most of them weren't very good poems!)

And then, without the whole context of our communications, some of the poems would sound over-the-top in their protestations of affection. Although it was platonic, it was also romantic. I have a horror of appearing like a silly old fool. 

When all's said and done, no matter how truthful everyone may think they are being, no-one can really know what goes on between two people, except those two people.

(That last is almost a quote from Downton Abbey. Back in those days, he and I would both have fallen about laughing at the idea of taking anything from such a show seriously. Nowadays I enjoy watching it, and not for satirical reasons.)

Process: Procrastinating

So  many people vowed excitedly to read every excerpt. But what excerpts? Hasn't been happening. My dear friend Helen urged me at the start of the year to begin in earnest. 'Oh all right', I half-joked ... and did nothing. Then she and another friend sent me things about writing every week. Good heavens! Discipline. Commitment. Scary stuff.

Not a problem with poetry, of course. Poetry is my love, my breath of life, my thing I can't not do.  And it can and does happen any time or anywhere.

But I do kinda want to do the memoir. It started tugging at me a little.

Aha – a strategy! A once-a-week date with myself to go out and write. Getting out of the house, where it is too easy to find distractions. Going with the purpose of memoir writing.

I could do it on my beloved iPad, of course. But I want something which reminds me I am SERIOUS about this. (And there are many distractions on a tablet, too.)

So here I am with my even more beloved new 13-inch MacBook Air that my son bought me last month. It's small and light enough to carry in a shoulder-bag. And it doesn't take up the whole damn table, like my old laptop.

I am at Cenzo Café, as usual the only café in town open on a Sunday afternoon. (This is a small rural town.) Even they will close the kitchen soon, at 3pm., but will still be serving coffee and cakes a while longer. I have had my coffee and cake already, to buy my table.

It was very busy here when I arrived, busier than usual. Because of Valentine's Day? That, and being the only option. Luckily their food and coffee are both good.

One of my favourite ways of procrastinating over my writing is to write instead about my writing process. I have just done it again. But Valentine's Day gives me an opening for real journalling: writing about love.

Next post coming up!

Why do it?

Because so many people have asked me. They want to know how I became psychic and witchy and magical and all that.

That's not all they want. I have in fact written two memoirs, sort of, as blogs: 'Shifting Fog: Dwelling with Dementia' and 'The Widowhood Chronicles'. People tell me they are useful, and ask me to publish them as books.

But they're not really books yet, just chronological outpourings. The widowhood one isn't finished, and in reality never will be, in the living of it, until I too die ... but I suppose I can find some arbitrary but logical-seeming end point. The other is misleading in its title, as the dementia turned out to be only a small part of Andrew's decline.

But the raw material is there.

So this new raw material I'm embarking on here will obviously be something other than those two experiences.

Will it be the 'spooky' memoir, full of magic and mystery and other-dimensional realities? Or will it be the many loves of Rosemary, licit and illicit? Or the dark family secrets? Or the time in prison? Maybe the lot!

(After all, if Goodreads can refer to T E Lawrence's 400,000-word The Seven Pillars of Wisdom as a memoir ... though I guess it qualifies, being only about that particular period of his life.)

I don't know yet which direction mine will take. Perhaps I'll find out in writing these preliminaries – like a friend who thought she was going to write about the witchy aspect of her life and found herself delving deep and often painfully into the story of mothering an autistic son – with a sense of absolute necessity. Some of us have particular stories that demand to be told before we can go on to write others.

Who knows? I'll just dive in and write whatever shows up to be written when I come to the page. I've tried organising it neatly before – hopeless.

Again, why do it? I have wondered! It needs to be something for me, not just to satisfy other people, or it'll never work. I have thought of doing it in poetry, and perhaps I will in the end, even though I think that would be bound to leave some gaps. Or maybe I'll just punctuate it with poems. Or have the poems be most of it, with only thin threads of connecting prose narrative.

No, that's not the why but the how of doing it.

I must want to at some level, or I wouldn't be playing with the idea. But every time I have tried in the past, it has proven so confronting – to me, not others – that I have abandoned it.

Recently I thought it might work to do it in the third person: maybe that wouldn't seem so scary. (So the how is important in resolving my issues with doing it in the first place.)

Finally I asked 'Upstairs' to give me a sign. 

'Should I do a memoir' I asked, 'or stick to my poetry?' (which is mostly confessional anyway, and which I enjoy). 

'Let me know within 48 hours,' I said. 

Within 48 hours I had not one but several signs.  Here they are, as noted in my personal journal:

1) A post in my emails, about memoir writing, jumped out at me.

2) Going through old files and posts this morning, came across a time line I'd made of events in my life, as preparation for memoir writing. (It didn't register at first, in this context, as my mind was on other things.)

3) Morning 2: Goodreads quote was T. E Lawrence, with a story about him losing the original ms of his 400,000 word memoir while travelling, and recreating the whole thing in 30 days. (Fancy calling The Seven Pillars a memoir! But I suppose it is, really.)

4) The Goodreads quote was a beautiful one: 

I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands / and wrote my will across the sky in stars

Reading it, I thought I understood why the last couple of nights I have been dreaming of people who were once very important in my life, but are no longer in it – through death, or moving in different directions. Memoir material, for sure. Not only have I had these dreams, I have remembered them in detail, without even writing them down after waking. I almost never remember my dreams.

So I am doing it because  Someone Up There tells me I should. Whether that's my Higher Self, or God, or The Universe, no matter – I asked, and I got told. OK, here we go!

Some people's names I will change, probably to nicknames or labels, for their and their families' privacy. With other people, e.g. my husbands, there's no hiding them – they're known.

I won't even try to put it in any particular order yet.