I've been thinking about the ways that we see ourselves and the ways that we do not; and also about the ways other people see us ---only in fragments.
We are continually like Marcel's nude: version of ourselves, always in construction in whatever instant we are in.
We never arrive in each new moment. We are never the same. There is no end point, no certainty. We are, simply, always becoming.
Today I am a bitten lip, a ruckus laugh, a tilt of shoulder. I am the clutch of fingers, the clench of jaw. I am whatever geometry of flesh and wonder, breath and instinct, fervor and blood you see me as.
I am that instant standing in the street, stirring a smile in reaction, skirt twirling in the wind; and also collected seconds crossing the street at a run. Just as I am the one they rush to at the door, small arms encircling my neck, and the one that fits against his heart, our breath finding its own syncopation.
I am always a fiction, a mosaic, a memory. We all are.
"Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember." Joan Didion said that in Blue Nights," and though its true long term memories, it's also true of yesterday.
We invent ourselves based on what we know. What we know conforms to who we know and where we are. We're shaped both by some bright irrevocable spark of spirit, and by the world as we inhabit it each day. We make ourselves, make our wonderment, make our delight, our grief; just as in turn the world makes us.
Day 11: #the5x5challenge