Blue

While writing about the past, (which I do sometimes, to understand my experiences) I have discovered that individual memory has a strange cadence.  It can be jagged.  Smooth as stone.  It can be a space between.  Arranging it, I am learning, is not so simple.  The order of things is never as linear as I imagine it to be.

I'm thinking of a book of non-fiction I read long ago, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche by Haruki Murakami, which includes a series of testimonies from victims of the attack.  The telling of events in these stories were eerily similar to one another, always beginning with time (the time of the trains, the wait, the need to be somewhere when) and, then, a sweet, sweet smell.

Today, I see a similar pattern, an order to our collective memories.  The memory of today almost always begins with a shock of blue sky.