Paying Attention

I've been looking through pictures of my life for two hours now.  Nearly 70 albums and ten years' worth and I sort slowly and flip through the captions and think about that day.  When I took a photograph.  When I posted it.  When I labeled it as what I thought it meant at the time, when I gave it, in gloss and newly cut edges, to the world so they could see what I saw and maybe feel what I felt, if only by imagining what a day in that coconut life could have been like.

    Some of these pictures I knew I was taking for the sake of the me I am now.  I knew that one day, I would be living a very different life.  It was fine then, and it's fine now, but I did not want to forget.
   
     Move on.  Move out and move away and move on and buy a shiny car for a shiny city and learn who you are when your life is big instead of small and move on.  But don't you dare forget this.  You will not get, nor will you deserve, the Universe's forgiveness if you forget that karma place which turned sleepers awake and matched the blue green irises of your eyes like a Postal Service song.  That place is gone, and its only hope is for everyone who loved it to remember it in their own colors so that all possible angles are covered.  So nothing is left out.  So that every single board has a creak which belongs to someone who gave their soul to that hill.

Do. Not. Forget.

But there's this thing about pictures.  You take them when you don't need them, anticipating that your future self will be so happy to have that photo of a ghost crab clacking through the night-soaked mangroves, when what your future self will really need is to remember the way the beach smells when the sun turns in its day, and how the midnight air hasn't quite learned how to be cool yet, so it opts for total dark in hopes that you'll feel or maybe just imagine the difference.

   Your future self will not need the pictures of you pretending to be the air in a Grecian windmill.  Your future self will want to taste the sticky warm of fresh baklava, and the ache of ouzo frosting a tall glass, turning water to sin and tourists to dancers,

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      So.  I wrote that last night after a picture binge (ill-advised, after a twelve-hour day worked in the concrete wall basement of a downtown hotel monster), and much of it is valid.  But I found that I wrote it doing what I always do, and this is the biggest part of the problem.  Not that I will forget the spray of a Dominican waterfall on my face, or the way the Northern Cape air tastes in the fog.  The simple truth of this, and of a life lived a thousand ways, is that I probably will forget these things.  I would venture to say that I have already forgotten a great deal of any fat number of things about each past life lived. This is growth as much as it is sadness, and sometimes, those two things are the same.

     The problem is focusing so much on all those old photographs that I forget to take new ones.  This is a life, too.  This one that's happening.  Right now is my life right now, and while I'm living inside coconut pictures, the city sun is trying to tell me that it matters just as much. It's up to me to pay attention.