March 11, 2021

Thursday

I picked my roommate Riley and his brother Nash up at the airport today. I followed my standard procedure of putting Terminal 1 into Google Maps while heading toward Terminal 2, missing the Terminal 2 exit and instead hurtling towards Terminal 1, turning around, arriving at Terminal 2 and realizing that Riley was at Terminal 1, then heading back to Terminal 1 to find them standing still and sagging under the weight of their luggage. In all, it went slightly smoother than the time I picked comedian James Adomian up from the PDX airport and peed myself in the process. I cannot even find my way to people who are standing still.

I’m trying to write an essay, but I have nothing, and brings me back to the difference between remembrance and recollection. If prompted or triggered by a story or an object in the world, you may be able to remember a trip to the zoo where you spilled a lemonade down your pants, but you may not be able to recollect it when attempting to pluck from the blue an anecdote concerning (say) stickiness or gibbons.

Family can be at times the most comforting and the most challenging persons in the context of bearing the death of a family member, or perhaps a very beloved monkey. That someone who lost the exact same human being, the one and only person who was this person and your irreplaceable patriarch or matriarch or zatriarch, automatically shoulders the burden twofold, for themselves and for you. Discrepancies in experience can be confusing, and gaps in memorial recollection othering. Why are my memories standing stone cold and still in the hangars of my recollections, like gibbons frozen in time and snow? Why do I cry in remembrance on this day and you all on that one? Why are your pants not wet with the lemonade of my discontent?