i am reading the sense of an ending by julian barnes. i bought it from shakespeare and co which always adds a mythic dimension to book purchases (history, all that chaos, the joy of FINDING). i may have already talked about this purchase. i remember it was a portentous summer day of rising cloud and imminent storms, notre dame staring blank-eyed at the sky. i like this book.

i still read a lot of history, and of course i’ve followed all the official history that’s happened in my own lifetime …

this got me thinking about my own “official history”.

• tiananmen square (1989)
• fall of the berlin wall (1989)
• the end of apartheid (early 90s)
• dissolution of the USSR (1991)
• death of diana princess of wales (1997)
• 9/11 (2001)
• economic crisis (begins 2008, ongoing)
• US elects barak obama (2009)
• the arab spring (begins end 2010)
• multiple earthquakes devastate my hometown (2010 onward)
• fukashima (2011)

there are huge gaps and if i was to consult a timeline i’m sure i’d be shocked at what i don’t remember and i was born well before 1989, but that’s the nature of memory. its incoherent beauty. i could have sworn that i saw footage from tiananmen square in 1985 when i remember seeing my first music video (money for nothing, dire straits), but i’m four years out. this is how i experience memory’s distance. just as i find beauty in imperfection, i find solace in memory’s inconsistency. its so inherently human.

when it comes to my “personal timeline”, i have no dates or years that match or none at least that make sense, except one and even that may evolve as i age:

• weaving my arm through the slats of our bunkbed to take hold my my twin sister’s outstretched arm
• seeing the moon rise golden orange over the canterbury plains
• my first gary larson cartoon
• my first ee cummings poem
• living with mary and friday joy
• first, second, third, fourth broken heart
• nick cave live
• a frozen tear in my eyelashes in the painful cold of february in nyc
• speechlessness in front of van gogh’s starry starry night
• rolling down a hill in a portland park with cory
• best marathon so far (that one has a date, 2011)

and travel throughout: walking around the windy dusty pyramids, blurring snow in the arctic circle, fireworks on new year’s eve in oslo, the smell of heat and orange blossoms in morroco on many occasions, soap bubbles in istanbul, missing a plane in dublin, eternal twilight in iceland, david bowie in montreux, gaudi in barcelona, mad monsoon rain in lisbon, crisp shadows and bicycles in amsterdam, italy italy italy, the tate in london, karaoke in seoul…

it’s endless.

julien barnes assures us: what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed. i know that’s true. we manage to mix it up, mess it up, change facts entirely, and yet that is what becomes our truth. our history.