yellow dots

When I was young, I’d walk home from school some days on the aptly named High School Road, heading straight down the center of the road stepping on all the worn yellow ceramic pavement markers; parts of their circular shape worn away like slot canyons in Utah, feeling my sneakers slip off their contours like the details of so many memories.

I can remember walking with my friend, David, who’d walk the whole way home on his toes to make his calves stronger: he had huge calves. Later on in life he’d end up managing a bar that occupied that unusual ground between a strip club and airport bar: lots of brightly colored shots and too many teeth in everyone’s mouth.

I’ve been feeling a lot recently that my memories have begun to crystalize in a way that I find a bit unsettling. The ability for a memory to mean lots of things has disappeared and I find myself looking back into a field of statutes. Each memory has suddenly become a monument to a single idea of a single moment, but somehow removed a bit from my own experience of it. It maybe feels a bit like that last scene of No Country for Old Men (or last page depending on how you consumed it) where our memories become dreams, and our dreams become strangers to exactly who we are; just dust sprinkled on tracks of a car long past.

Maybe it’s a bit the feeling of the world becoming very factual in a way. I’ve talked with people who believe fiction is not needed as a genre as there is plenty in reality to look at in wonder. I would argue that the parts of reality we take wonder in, are parts that still have an unknown to them and therefore are fictions in our mind. We converse around these ideas of this “real” thing and in fact are telling stories of the same memory of the present in a different way.

One person tells the story of a road dotted in yellow ceramic disks, while another tells the story of a road that rose and fell with waves of emotion for future ex-girlfriends.