I Know Where

By Katherine Casey

I know where the sadness lives in you. I know the savagery, too. 

I know how it felt to lie on your mother’s chest, skin to skin, and hear her heart beat; how whatever happens and wherever you go, you feel her with you. 

I know how your mother lost babies and how each of those unrealized souls somehow landed in you, making it so you were never just your own.

I know how it was to hold your baby brother for the first time and pray that he would stay. 

I know how it felt to ride your bike behind your grandfather on your way to see the stars in the sky over the ocean, how he invented names for constellations that were not there, and how you loved the stories that might be. 

I know what it was to see your father’s face for the last time that you did not know would be the last time, after you had just eaten squash soup in a tiny cafe while it rained. I know what it was to bury him and feel that you’d done it all wrong. 

I know what it felt like to starve. 

I know how you have tried to forget the blurry men, the ones who were so casual with their violations. I know what it was to hate them and when hating them was not an option, to hate yourself instead. 

I know how it felt to abandon the idea of babies from your body. I know what it was to choose the humans who were offered to you, to love them, to stitch a family together. I know what it is to mother in ways the world will never see. 

I know all these things. 

Memory is slippery. Fluid, not fixed. Hard to hold. It is  groundwater. It is science. It is art. Your memories are flashes, single images on a screen. Autobiography is fiction; there is no straight story of your life. You are an act of creation. You are a tenuous thing, an idea of yourself. You have lived with stories, untouched and unquestioned, for years, stories that have given you a sense of your own shape, though you’d never bothered to ask if they were true. 

Write it down. New details – was it really like that? – can retell a story whose outline you recalled but whose complexity you had flattened. You become different when you add a new clause, when you move a comma and it changes everything, when you learn to tell it slant, just a little. Memories are the stuff of new truth and infinite imagination and this is a very good thing.

The act of retrieving a memory changes it. When you recall the brand of cigarettes your grandmother smoked or getting locked in the bathroom at the Friday dance you awaken the neurons tasked with holding each memory safe. The act of their arousal changes not just the physics of your gray matter but the things recalled themselves. Each time you retrieve small flashes of your life they are changed, ever so slightly, simply because you remembered them.

Memory is a hopeful thing.

Katherine Casey is a writer, educator, and advocate living in the mountain state of Colorado by way of the waters and woods of North Carolina, Maryland, Pennsylvania, California, and Massachusetts. Her writing focuses on human bodies and the natural world, invisible disability, somatic memory, and the peculiar politics of living in a woman’s body. Katherine is a member of the Lighthouse Writers Workshop Book Project where she has worked with remarkable artists: Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Anna Qu, Sarah Elizabeth Schantz, Alexander Lumans, Natlie Hodges, Andrea Dupree, and others. She has published her creative work with journals including bioStories and the Gilded Weathervane. 

She is working on her memoir Lunacy and the Wilderness.