The human experience is all about the remembering. What do we leave behind? What does our human footprint say about us? I know that I leave little pieces of myself everywhere and so often that I should be fined for dropping litter that isn’t as easy to pick up as plastic bags or cardboard cups or fast food wrappers. I leave words tucked in mailboxes, eyelashes on the eaves of a home that’s been for sale since last fall. There’s a fingernail behind that bush and look, here’s some lung on the tarp covering a swimming pool that I snuck into two years ago. Calf, knee, a bit of elbow laid out like seashells on the shelf above the child’s bed in the home across the street where I used to babysit. A strand of hair wrapped around the pinky of the woman who let me in front of her at the grocer’s the other day; the teenagers holding hands on the park bench where I left part of my spine. There’s half of my clavicle being used as a pencil holder on the desk of the man who slaves away seventy hours a week at a job he can’t stand for a wife he might leave and my angel bones are the wedding bells the day my cousin got married. All anyone ever talks about is that every seven years we are erased; cells are new, skin is clearer, teeth glisten with enamel the color of moonbeams. No one ever remembers what happens to the old parts of us that nature decides we don’t need. But we are recyclable and therefore recycled. I will try to never forget that the atoms in my right thumb could have been atoms in Cleopatra’s ankle. We are made of memory. These temporary bodies belong to everything.
(via nataliebootlah)
