Memories, like the Bloodstains of My Mind

I can't remember my stories anymore.

People have anecdotes, pithy stories about people they knew, things they've done, funny things that happened to or around them. Everyone has such stories, and the older you get, the more tales you accumulate.

The more a tale is told, the more it grows substance of its own, so that, in time, though it may not be told exactly as the events occurred, it will be told in its own fashion. Every time. Over and again until the point that those who know you well tire of it. Or reminisce over it, depending on whether they have more of a penchant for boredom or for nostalgia.

This is what generally happens with stories. But there are always other tales that are lost through disuse--times of embarrassment, trivial experiences, things that may not arise in the memory until a particular smell, sight, or notion raises them dimly to the surface of the mind. Sometimes, they are lost forever. Sometimes, you know that the memory is there, but you fail any attempt to dredge it from the sludge of memory to the banks on which you can focus. *Poetic, huh?*

My memories have been mostly lost through disuse. Not because they aren't interesting. Not because of embarrassment (those personal shames I only wish I could forget--they sometime torture me in the depths of the night). No, because they are not PG memories, not fit for consumption in the workplace, and despised by my husband, who wishes to have chosen a wife more conventional. I play my part of good girl arguably well, but as a consequence I cannot remember many of the more interesting tales that I own.

No, PG is only part of the problem. That my memories are unconventional, that they tell the tale of a foolish girl drawn more to demons than to heights, that they include things of which the general populace only knows through episodes of TV dramas--that is the problem. That they are things more common in the private discussions of men and not generally admitted between the sexes is another. That I prefer to discuss these things openly, bawdily, yes, shockingly, is perhaps the most. There is only so much window-dressing one can use to discuss sex, only so many common experiences in drinking without devolving into lurid tales. Only so many ways one can listen to tales of youthful folly without lurching into one's own, turgid and odd though they be.

Sometimes, I think it might be better to forget. It's not as if I could legitimately publish these tales without suffering consequences to my personal life. If I tell them, if I write them, I will not censor them. This will cause me no end of personal grief, if anyone in my life reads them. There are tales you can tell without consequence, giddy little stories that bear no burden on their owner, that provide little but amusement to the hearer. I do not own these stories. They are not the tales I can tell, not honestly, at least, and I refuse to write dishonestly. I would rather not write.

So that's what I have done. I have not written, for fear of retribution. I have not committed anything to paper for fear of the consequences. I have a right to my fear--after all, it was partly on the basis of a particular written purging of emotion I was locked in a mental institution as a teen.

Perhaps, though, I can write them here. It isn't as if anyone will notice. It may be cathartic. It may lessen the ache of ennui and uselessness that clings to my chest. I haven't that much hope, but it might. I may begin my tales the next time I write.