Ephemera
Everything is bound to obscurity. Yes, some things will be remembered better and longer than others. Some documents will remain for a time. The mummified and fossilized parts of our cultures, personal lives, memories, selves may someday be found. But ultimately, it is all the dust our planet started off as. In a way, all things are mortal.
I have always struggled to keep a diary because I tend to want to describe every bit of what I've experienced and put it into context for some hypothetical future reader: Who I am in every detail, what I like and how much and my history with it, exactly how I felt at the time and now, what the weather was and is and may be, what distracted me from writing, why, and why it matters. This tendency makes my entries cluttered and sprawling and the point of it all becomes the needle (so to speak) in the haystack. The point beyond the immediate point is the simple statement that I live. I exist. That point is moot.
I have turned, for a number of reasons (that I will attempt not to expand upon), to writing in a more clinical, documentative way. This has not helped my desire to linger on the details. It's probably just another force in the riptide pulling me away from the shore of succinct understandability.
I don't speak clinically. When talking to people, I try to be rather light, quick, friendly, and focused on them. When talking to someone I trust, I linger and ramble and have a tendency to repeat my ideas in different words and metaphors. I trip between topics and lose my point. I grasp at the idea I mean to share like I'm grabbing at the sparkling scales of unseen fish in murky water. How can I be sure they understand me perfectly? How can I give you my experience of walking on a sunny fall day here, now, on this afternoon, with the sun exactly as it is and the breeze striking your face exactly at my height as you stand in my body with my hair blown back? I can't. The moment is a memory and that memory is flawed and it's all headed towards nothing.
I collect ephemera. Little pieces of things meant to be thrown away and forgotten. Ticket stubs (a common one), paper tags on special stuffed toys, doodles I drew in the corners of notes, pressed leaves, bits of wrapping paper, greeting cards, images on cookie boxes... I have a big scrap book of such things with notes made on the black pages in white gel pen. I live. I exist.
It and me, my memories, my point. We are headed towards nothing. In flakes and tears and obscuring stains. Thank goodness. I don't have to be a successful historian of my own life because the task is too daunting. The experience of life too formidable in all of its minutia. I live. I exist. I am ephemera. I am dust. I am happy to know it.