Remembrance

A poem : Part 2

Most assume that memories are things which live in the past, left behind. Some of them we like to keep alive, like pets, kept in check, in cages. That they are immutable, is a common diversion from what stares at us blindly when we engage with the compartments we think we know so well. What might be inside, no one can tell.

You don’t remember who you were with that day. Of all the people you spent your years with here. But through your knuckles rubbed bare by bush-hammered concrete, you embraced the brutalist beauty, the neighbourly love, a sense of community. The first time you saw the place you ran scared. But it kept coming back to you.

The three Shakespeare’s of this memory. Drinking inside one, showing off the other, being looked over by the tallest whose floors felt like years of memories stacked one atop the other. Chamberlin, Powell and Bon looking over too as the ticking time of number 60 marches sequently in your and your forgotten company’s consciousness. 

Too young and nervous of yourself to appreciate the first revelation. Back then you needed to survive situations not drink them in as experience. It was all carpets, concrete, wood and adult: modern for any age. The views, looking out on those who could be kin, and how the flowers on the window sill transitioned the softness within. 

This was the place you might one day live. That wasn’t a memory of then, but one that came later. You romanticised the first meeting, you think, or did you really experience - how to dissociate it, with the way you feel now. If the impression was that cataclysmic you would have remembered with at least some sort of minutiae or detail.

At 44 floors you'd only have reached 21, were each one memory,  one per year, that you kept safe on lower levels as you rose. To have just one memory a year, would you treasure them more? When to pick them? Would a ceremony replace resolution, reflecting upon one exceptional thing that had come to fruition. What year was this?

Now, you think, it only makes sense if a memory is something that more than one  experiences. But even then there is no certainly, no irrefutable evidence, no assured solidity. We all sustain things differently, for a start, and haven’t you ever been tempted to tell the tale a little taller than it really was. What does your witness say?

Ah, you don’t remember who you were with that day.

Shakespeare Tower, Barbican Estate, London. Chamberlin, Powell & Bon
November 2019. Nikon d750