About a month ago, I caught The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The title always intrigued me but it took extreme boredom for me to finally get around to see it. It has an interesting premise. Boy meets girl, then girl loses all her memories of the boy. It’s 50 First Dates but only more twisted. Upon realizing that her memory loss is far from accidental, the guy undergoes the same procedure only to discover that it is incredibly difficult to purge his mind of all memories of her — and that he didn’t even want to. Spotless mind is literal here, and so is eternal sunshine. Hence, love is that blotch of yellow that remains in your sight even when you shut your eyes after staring too long into the sun.
My mind is far from spotless. Teaching history has had a profound effect on my spirit, and hence the past is inevitably part of the present. There are several events that I would like purged but I’ve come to stand by the belief that we fall so we learn to pick ourselves up. And yet this falls into the category of things that are easier said. I don’t always succeed, more often I don’t, and in those moments when I wish the past could just be purged, I retreat.
I retreat into skyscrapers. Any cityscape would yield images of buildings racing towards the sky. Buildings within which people race with each other to get a raise, intentionally neglecting to question their existence and convincing themselves that perhaps they’ve found meaning in the routines they do. Yet the most ominous skyscrapers are those that exist within our minds. In these places we are all CEOs, calling the shots and convincing ourselves of the myth of our own self-importance.
I notice that retreating into skyscrapers is how I deal. I work hard — too hard at times — on those things I know I can make a difference in, not bothering anymore to find those things that may make a difference in me. Because those things that change me stay forever with me, and hence there is some strange comfort in being so far up that skyscraper where no one can touch me. However, it is true what they say — it is lonely at the top. That no matter how many people you save, it will be yourself that will be most important. So I remind me to take care of me but even that, I discover, is getting more difficult to do.
For the spice of life does not happen in the boardrooms and the conference halls, but in the obscure coffee shops and public parks that punctuate different parts of the city. I realize that there are times we must go down from the highest floors and spill into the mezzanine for a quick cup of coffee with a friend we haven’t seen. Better yet we evacuate the building in haste to fly kites, ride bicycles, and lick ice cream while sitting along the curb. Even much more await outside the city — the beach, the mountain, the valley — places that I’ve reduced to generalities for I now lack the adjectives to describe their scents and sights. It has been too long, and it will be longer still.
