Nightlight

What's in a memory?

Today at the kitchen we were talking about the way that certain songs recall certain seasons or moments, a conversation initiated when Buckles mentioned that Iron & Wine always makes her think of winter. Every time I hear Feist's The Reminder, it takes me back to late nights in the spring of my senior year of high school when I would drive home at 11:30, exhausted after a full day of school and work. Or that strange potion of Owl City, Jesus Culture's Your Love Never Fails, Josh Garrels and Jacaranda Tree, and the song "Stole My Heart" by Little & Ashley, which somehow can't quite shake off the scent of last summer.

I don't entirely know how to live in this new world. I am sitting on top of a mountain of memories, but to climb down the mountain is to encounter not only roses, but thorns also, which grow in greater profusion. How do I hope when I feel as if my hope operates backwards in time? I have so much life ahead of me: I know. But something has been quietly, slowly crushed and left to die, and now it's a hard thing to know quite why I ought to move forward except perhaps that in this fast-moving current I cannot stand still, and so must float. And yet...