Bittersweetly: Perfect

Some memories are too sacred to be written down. They are too pure, too elusive. Their existence is so thin, so minimal, that if I were to reach out and try to grasp them, trap them and smother them onto a sheet of crisp lined paper, they would evaporate and forever evade me, joining the host of other memories I have forgotten as age and distance have clouded my mind.

I was thinking last night about my Grandmother's house. Now that I live far away, I only visit a few times a year, but when I was a child I was there almost weekly. I started to think about her house at night, the bed I would sleep in, the stories she would tell as she tucked me in for the night, the "midnight snacks" my brother and I would sneak from the kitchen. As I started to go over every delicious little detail, savouring the experience, I realized I couldn't exactly describe the way the air smelled, or the way the floors sounded as we tiptoed across them, or the feel of the pillow and blankets on my bed. I wanted to jot it all down, forever cement it in my memory; but as I did it was as though the memory started to disintigrate, giving way to the exact words I was trying to confine the memory to. So I stopped, dead in my tracks, horrified that I might lose this sacred childhood memory.

Some memories are too delicate, too precious. If I write them down, I risk reinventing them in my mind. The moment I put pen to paper and begin to spell them out, they are instantly transformed into what my adult mind makes of them. What the childhood me saw and heard and smelled and touched and felt, on my skin and in my heart, is wiped away, forever lost; and this new version, the pulp and ink version, is all that remains: a sad replica that is neither true or touching. Some memories are best kept as memories. Sweet, undefined capsules of a world that was, and shall forever be, bittersweetly: perfect.