Brewing of memory

If butterflies come out of scary hideous caterpillers, leapy frogs out of limbless swamp-bound tadpoles, and graceful snowy swans out of humble shabby ducklings, it is most conceivable that the bitter memory of our past can in time become the honey on our daily morning bread or the sherry by the fireplace in cold wintry nights.

The transformation of agony into relish has helped many of us to crown our teenage days as the happiest period of our lives. When we indulge in recalling the innocent days as free from money concerns, office politics and all the talking and laughing behind our back, we have had perhaps shoved into the corner of the cupboard the moments we had got cross for the things which we now sneer as silly but were then as big as the whole universe for us: things like our little pet dog brought away by our parents, the breast standing out from all other girls' chest except ours, and perhaps the teacher's fetching the first porn book from our bag and swearing he would talk to our parents.

My fight against memory has proved to be the little fly's struggle to escape the cobweb. More and more I am resigned to the fact that the image of the person is here to stay with me. Another person with whom I had spent three happy weeks three years ago is still lingering in the backyard of my mind and is recalled again and again by the place we had been, the humid and chilling March air we had bathed in, or the records we had loved, etc; so what antidote is there for me to purge the feelings I had had with the person in whom my whole heart had dwelled for two long years? I have just begun trying to convince myself that perhaps daring to remember is the beginning of the end of remembering, or at least it's the beginning of an end to its torture. What started out as sorrow will decompose, ferment and emerge as the rainbow after rain.

Sam Mok
moksheungming@yahoo.com
2000.1.19

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