"There was an old man of Dunoon
Who always ate soup with a fork
For he said, 'As I eat
Neither fish, fowl, nor flesh,
I should finish my dinner too quick.' "
—W. S. Gilbert
"These small rooms we have for unbearable time—drawers, boxes, envelops—the first architecture of deferred grief. Neither tombs nor museums, neither forgetting nor remembering. Spaces of postponement. Nothing placed there ever truly rests, not even in the tenderness of the act.
Before there is a drawer, before there is a box, an envelope, a pendant, there is the hand. The hand that receives. The hand that hesitates. The hand that folds and unfolds, that smooths and presses. The hand that learns the weight of things. Memory that lives in the fingers.
Perhaps what need not be forgotten is this: the relic does not belong to the past but to the present that confronts it. To this body, this voice, this distance.
And a possible paradox: while the relic belongs to the present, she who keeps it lives in the past. Though I do not necessarily see it that way—or rather, not at all times, not in all contexts."
—@dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
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