I was assaulted yesterday with a most peculiar memory. The time frame of this particular recollection was nebulous at best, dated to a period of my life that I generally label as quasi-memory, those years from five to seven, even eight, from which I still preserve lingering sensations but very few discrete, lucid memories from. What's more is that all these vague apparitions of this sort are supremely hard to sharpen without great leaps of imagination making prodigious use of Gilbert's "filling-in" technique.
But from time to time I feel like ambling farther back in time than I'm accustomed. I seek in these long, solitary walks through my mostly cloistered life to perhaps limn my existence in something bordering on novelistic beauty. And as I go I sweep together little shards of what was once extant (or at least what I hold to be such) and conjure from such paltry evidence a grand narrative arc of whimsy and internal metamorphosis.
I digress. My point in starting this now much too attenuated post was simply the remembrance of a certain pattern of leaves, and the exotic taste of salty upholstery in my juvenile mouth. Somehow these two sensations come entwined in my mind... so much so that I must infer at one time that I chewed on the leafy upholstery of an old couch, one that I can almost remember my family owning but am cautiously skeptical of declaring as absolute existing in my life. Yet how can it not be? I remember its taste--acrid and moist--its color--ochre with dull brown leaves--its standard span and the bedraggled nature of its cushions. I remember all these things; I swear, I hope, I declare.
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