We are the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. It’s a blurry story, made from memory. And while memories refer to the past, they never stop changing and expanding. Each memory is infinite.
My grandma Alicia died several years ago. I cherish many memories of her, some are clear, and some are blurry and others (a few) are crystalline, because my brain goes back to them often and polishes them until they shine. My grandma grew up without money, without a house of her own. She couldn’t study High School; she didn’t have a space she could claim for herself when she was little. But she was very intelligent and curious, and enjoyed art and literature, and had a good eye and ear for beauty in the world. When I lived in Mexico City to study college, I liked visiting her in her apartment. That apartment, a space at last completely hers, was a feminine and tidy and bright universe, without a speck of dust. My grandma always had two or three books in her bedroom next to the bed, and two more books in the bathroom. She never stopped reading more than one book simultaneously, a piece of paper marking the page in each of them, books on philosophy, history, many novels (many National Geographic magazines). And one day, around that time, she gave me a hardcover, olive green book. It was "Jane Eyre." It’s the only book she ever gave me. A book she treasured. I like finding parallels between Jane Eyre and my grandma: both with unpredictable childhoods in houses that belonged to someone else, both intelligent, sensitive spirits. I imagine that my grandma as a teenager also had the restless and resolute glance of a bird that flutters behind the closed set bars of a cage. But unlike Jane Eyre, my grandma had a loud, explosive laughter you could hear from a distance.
Shortly before dying, my grandma looked out the window and saw the jacaranda trees blooming in the city with their purple patches. We were alone in her apartment and went up to the roof of the building to see the jacarandas better. That memory has no end, it's cyclical: it returns between March and April, when the flowers return to the trees. It’s a soft and sweet memory because I expect it, and look forward to it, every year.
Jane Eyre is a sharp and piercing memory. I just saw the movie with Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska and suddenly remembered the book, and the olive green hardcover, and the absence of my grandma, who left this earth more than 15 years ago, was for a while again an enormous, impossible absence. The story of my grandma Alicia is part of my story and is simultaneously in my past and in my future, because I don't know when or how her memory will hit me hard and by surprise, without a chance to prepare my heart for the assault.
Memories don't bloom in a neat garden. They blossom in the wilderness, unpredictable. Sometimes they carry the thread of a clear story, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, but sometimes they’re just spasms. This fall I’ve been to the forest a lot, and I’ve seen it change from a vivid, multicolor explosion in the beginning to a monochromatic picture, all yellow and copper, at the end. That copper image of the forest looks a lot like the tapestry on the armchairs we had in the living room when I was a child. It looks like the print on a blouse my mom wore long ago. We keep, unknowingly, images that are never-ending. Our memory is a collection of echoes that widen and multiply, the new images of the present and the old images of the past touch and reverberate and ring on each other; our memories are a messy ball of thread getting tangled and untangled in the world.
It gets dark very early now. I go for walks in the forest on the weekends when it isn’t raining, although the leaves are gone, and the trees are just their bones. Usually I return at nightfall. I love walking in the woods at dusk when the colors of everything get brighter or muted for a few minutes, before going completely dark. The massive skeletons of the maple trees were made for the twilight. It is their most powerful hour. And when I see the electric sky and I see the light descend into the night, and I look at the forest in these northern places, and I feel a needle of cold on my face, I think of another Alicia, daughter of my grandma Alicia, who also left this world, recently, but is still in the world, in the minutes between day and night (her favorite hour), in the forest and the cold (which she enjoyed), as long as those of us who can are still here to remember her. All my memories of them, the two Alicias, and all my memories, are alive and grow and change and will make echoes I can’t guess in futures I don’t know, and are sometimes like a cat’s shadow slipping from the corner of the eye, and sometimes like rain that falls on us, defenseless, the same way it falls on the plants and the earth.
