Yellow Cat Pillow

My mother made this pillow for me when I was about four or five years old...yes yes its hand made and if you look closely, you will see a childhood of spilled juices, sleepy dribble and stray pen marks on its yellow life...
Frayed red threads disobey the circles of its eyes.
The nose is long gone.
One side has three whiskers, one less than the other.
The collar is half gone too.

Much gone...little left…
I haven't let my mother stitch the cat back into respectability....in its abused disarray it reminds me more of things gone and lost. What’s missing is what I fill with half memories.

I am a compulsive chronicler…a hoarder of memories in tangible forms and shapes…
Where we judge our lives in memories and moments, I am constantly loosing them. I have difficulty remembering….I will loose half of what you say to me within five minutes of your having said it. I cannot hold onto thoughts, be they yours or mine…they slip through my fingers like grains of sand…a perpetual game of hide-and-seek…

I live in fear of forgetting...forgetting what to remember and forgetting nothing at all. I wonder often if I will ever have stories to tell. Will they come in quietly to me on a distant summer afternoon or will they shove their way through a cold winter night as I sleep? Or will I draw a blank? Will I loose all my stories?
A singular past and innumerable metaphors of living it now. A ghost. A knot.
We live in questions that haunt….wanting answers that are true. But where do we meet when your truth is different from mine? Where questions are futile and answers naïve, there memories trick us into believing.
I keep a scrapbook of sorts….I have tripped a little too often over what I remember and what I think I remember…I no longer wish to question myself with things I remember.
And so I hoard.
I collect…I preserve…I stick and paste memories from here and there into this little black scrapbook of mine.
Tickets from the ride up to the second floor of the Eiffel Tower…
A paper napkin with a silly doodle by a friend long gone and lost in living…
A postcard from long ago…
The first salary slip…
A photograph and a letter from a grandparent…
A entry pass from a western classical symphony
Movie tickets…dinner bill…

It growers thicker and fatter with the days that go by…I carry my knots with me…the more I live, the more the knot grows…
My ghosts walk with me…I leave some behind and others I commit to memory in this black little book…
And as I wrote somewhere earlier here…. knots will travel...knots will run...
but unravel they never will...carry those knots..lug them around. throw a few and gather anew.
live.