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It was almost finished: the detailed model of the memory he had spent the last few years searching for. A search begun after a short but terrifying moment one particular night (a night thus far unmemorable). The night had gone something like this: woke up; realized the reason he had woken up was a lack of breath; reached for oxygen that his body failed to absorb; opened his mouth only to find nothing there, nothing that was willing to fill his lungs; noticed he had left his body and saw himself choking into nothingness, just white, recently washed sheets around him.
And then, out of nowhere, something, a little sound (he thought), or at least something that sounded like a sound, something not so trivial, a vivid but veiled memory that made life flow again. That which had brought life back into him had not only brought back his body; his body was brought back into something, something full and sweet, something he knew he knew, but was forgotten. He became obsessed with the sweetness and fullness he felt connected with, something that he called ‘it’. Immediately the same night, the night now made memorable due to what had happened, he crammed his ideas and thoughts about what ‘it’ could be onto small, sticky pieces of yellow paper.
He was tracing ‘it’ and felt how he was coming closer and closer to knowing it. There were moments when he thought he would embrace what he was looking for in a split second, something ‘just around the corner’. But always, the thing he was chasing found a way to escape. The harder he tried the more he seemed to forget what ‘it’ exactly was all about.
He changed his strategies; he surrounded ‘it’ carefully and peeled the mystery from the thing he wanted to know so obsessively.
That’s actually how the idea of a model began. Since ‘it’ had hit a memory deep inside him, ‘it’ had to be something in his brain, he thought.
He created a copy of his brain with its collective memories represented by the sticky yellow notes, by images he had drawn or torn out of magazines, and by sounds he had collected. Sometimes (almost always when he was not so busy chasing) images entered his mind that resonated with ‘it’. He wrote them down and stuck them into his model: jigsaw pieces of a puzzle soon to be whole.
tagged: light spaciousness connectedness life Body mind memory
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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Tired barn, leaning backwards, some planks missing / an old farm, feeding cows, my job since I didn’t want to go on a school trip. A mountain, creamy cloud on the top, vanilla / first clouds seen from above, viewed from an airplane window. Moose, at least a dozen, walking on water, religiously / skating on a ditch behind the house, drinking hot chocolate after making a quick circuit. Two men cutting down a tree, the tree turning to wood that will soon go up in fire / a body, suddenly lighter than a second ago. A woman walking with two dogs, ten traces in the snow / my aunt carrying bags of groceries, on her way to make food for us.
In my head I hear the clicking sound of a camera. And just as a digital camera can show pictures taken earlier, my mind projects pictures from long ago, from someone I no longer am, randomly alluding to the pictures I see now.
The train stops. People grab suitcases and climb into coats. Thick coats. Outside, people are waiting, sitting on suitcases or standing next to them, ready to leave for home.
“Scotty.” A woman’s voice. She’s calling to a little boy dressed in red ski pants and a red coat, the latter still unzipped. They don’t match, the coat and the pants; the reds are different. Underneath the coat he has a fleece jacket. He wears glasses. Quite thick ones, turning his eyes into eggs. His hair is white. He is little and probably small for his age. “You’ll catch a cold.” Not a worried voice, an irritated one. Scotty seems to be too excited. His right hand grasps his skis; his grip is strong. He holds a mountain. With his left foot he plays with the snow, plunging it into the white, pulling it out, showing the snow to the sun. After a few seconds the snow starts to melt, dripping on the ground, more yellow now, like porridge. Snow doesn’t like to be described; it wants to be felt.
“Zip it!” An order now. Snow falls, softly, tenderly. Scotty doesn’t hear the voice. He’s seeing himself going down the slopes. His hips make similar movements to those he made moments ago, up the hill. He is sealing his memory. “Scotty.” A man’s voice now. “Do you want to go skiing next year? Then zip your coat.”
The boy tries to zip his coat but doesn’t know where to put his skies. His legs are like rubber bands. The man’s voice continues, blind to Scotty’s efforts: “Shall I smack you?” The words are too far away for Scotty to recognise. The man looks strong. A sportsman? His hair is white, too; cut short. His face is a map of still-to-be-lived sadness. His coat’s zipped.
Scotty sees himself in the future, when he’s become ‘Scott.’ He sees that his father is visiting him and that he leaves his coat on, zipped up. Scotty decides that if the vision comes true, he won’t ask his father to undo his jacket.
Scotty is almost losing his balance trying to do the zip thing. Only his skis hold him in place. A few seconds later he snatches something from his trouser pocket. A stone he’s grabbed, secretly. Where would he have found it? Has he had it for a long time or is it a recent find? It seems to feel familiar to him. But familiarity doesn’t say anything about time. Some things feel instantly familiar.
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 Photo: André Platteel
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