Telemachus

I mean to make a habit of writing on here every day again, and with Lent about to start I thought I'd sneak in one last post.

I'm in a math class. We learned about Base 10. And now I look at the finger-spread of my ten fingers, twice, and think about how that's my age.

I got a book off interlibrary loan--they had to get it all the way from Ithaca--that hasn't been checked out since May 25th, 1993. The last set of fingerprints in those pages were made before I had fingerprints of my own. My mom would've just found out she was pregnant with me.

Twenty years.

Odysseus would just be coming home.

Twenty years old, 2 PM

I have memories so vague I'm afraid they'll disintegrate if I write them down. I read when I was little about the man who first unsealed the tombs of Egypt. There was a necklace hanging from a chair, and somebody touched it and the string turned to dust on the instant, beads flying every which way. It took hours to gather them up. The necklace had hung there for hundreds of years, intact, because no one had moved it.

In the same way I have memories grown so faint within the finger-span of my two decades' timeline that I'm sure, when I fixate my brain on one, I'm not remembering the thing itself but rather my own memory of remembering it, recalled at a later period. Memories fade as they are stored and desperately replicate themselves when stirred, each one a worser copy of the last, less image, more static.