Sure, I remember something, even though it was so long ago and it’s like looking through a darkened window with my nose pressed against the cold glass. I remember dancing, and holding onto her and she was holding onto me. I remember that, but try as I might, I don’t remember any of the songs we danced to. If I close my eyes, I can recall what it felt like – leastways, I think I can, though maybe the feelings then are all mixed up with the feelings now.
But the real thing is, it’s like those memories have been passed onto me, because I’m not the boy I was back then.
I got pictures all stuck in a book, and that book tucked in a drawer so I can put my hand on it in a moment, and there’s hundreds of pictures, and I know all the places they was taken in – even if those places is all long gone – and I can tell you the year and maybe the season; and I know her and I know what she was to me back then. I even recognize the pictures of me, but there’s the difference, because I don’t know really know me in the pictures, not what I’m thinking.
If this sounds a little fucked up, maybe you’re right. The years can do that, I reckon. Some days I don’t even know the name of the woman across the street or recognize her when she says good morning. Things in our memory can get all mixed up and thrown about and we need those old pictures to help pin things down. Not just pictures, but we need to talk about those days, and I ain’t got no one I can talk to, not really, so I talk to myself.
Then today there was something playing on the radio, a song I recognized. It took my breath away at first and it took me back. I just stopped – thinking and doing and breathing. The song was important somehow, but I couldn’t be sure what its importance was. Like when I have lost a word and I can feel something of its shape and its taste on my tongue, but still it escapes me. Then I suddenly caught my breath and it was like resurfacing after a dive into deep water, and I was standing holding air and thinking I was holding her, and shifting my feet to the music, and not wanting any of it to end.
That’s what got me thinking and remembering, or trying to. That’s what prompted me to get out the old photographs, and she was in almost a hundred pictures of that far-off time; but there was not one of us dancing, and so my memory of that is not certain. Certain it is that we danced, and maybe we danced once to that song that was playing on the radio, and I was holding onto her and she was holding onto me, and like that we thought it would last forever, which maybe it will seeing as how there’s a fractured bit of it in my memory; but then maybe we didn’t dance to that song in particular and the song holds another importance and another shape and another taste, and that is lost to me like words can be lost sometimes.
Patricia Ann McNair 
Sure, I remember something, even though it was so long ago and it’s like looking through a darkened window with my nose pressed against the cold glass. I remember dancing, and holding onto her and she was holding onto me. I remember that, but try as I might, I don’t remember any of the songs we danced to. If I close my eyes, I can recall what it felt like – leastways, I think I can, though maybe the feelings then are all mixed up with the feelings now.
But the real thing is, it’s like those memories have been passed onto me, because I’m not the boy I was back then.
I got pictures all stuck in a book, and that book tucked in a drawer so I can put my hand on it in a moment, and there’s hundreds of pictures, and I know all the places they was taken in – even if those places is all long gone – and I can tell you the year and maybe the season; and I know her and I know what she was to me back then. I even recognize the pictures of me, but there’s the difference, because I don’t know really know me in the pictures, not what I’m thinking.
If this sounds a little fucked up, maybe you’re right. The years can do that, I reckon. Some days I don’t even know the name of the woman across the street or recognize her when she says good morning. Things in our memory can get all mixed up and thrown about and we need those old pictures to help pin things down. Not just pictures, but we need to talk about those days, and I ain’t got no one I can talk to, not really, so I talk to myself.
Then today there was something playing on the radio, a song I recognized. It took my breath away at first and it took me back. I just stopped – thinking and doing and breathing. The song was important somehow, but I couldn’t be sure what its importance was. Like when I have lost a word and I can feel something of its shape and its taste on my tongue, but still it escapes me. Then I suddenly caught my breath and it was like resurfacing after a dive into deep water, and I was standing holding air and thinking I was holding her, and shifting my feet to the music, and not wanting any of it to end.
That’s what got me thinking and remembering, or trying to. That’s what prompted me to get out the old photographs, and she was in almost a hundred pictures of that far-off time; but there was not one of us dancing, and so my memory of that is not certain. Certain it is that we danced, and maybe we danced once to that song that was playing on the radio, and I was holding onto her and she was holding onto me, and like that we thought it would last forever, which maybe it will seeing as how there’s a fractured bit of it in my memory; but then maybe we didn’t dance to that song in particular and the song holds another importance and another shape and another taste, and that is lost to me like words can be lost sometimes.