there are no drugs for this

My past is being rewritten for me it seems, and not in the typical 'fell back in time and made different decisions' sense... if that is typical. It is a very different kind of being rewritten. People I know keep remembering things differently. Not anyone I live with in Portland. And not any one particular person. But I have had about three weeks of  people who either do not remember at all or who have totally rewritten a past that I shared with them.

It is a very ambiguous sense of loss, a very certain alone-ness, and very likely steps toward losing my own grip on reality. My past and my reaction to it have made me who I am. Memories are important if fleeting. Count how many times God tells the Israelites to remember, to teach their children, to take care not to forget. I am not unaware of how much my whole life has been built on the breath of God willing me to make it long after I am tired and do not want to try anymore. I do not want to forget a thing, good or bad or even ugly.

However, I am afraid these past few weeks have made me question if I truly remember my own life. There are enough people telling me that what I know is wrong or worthless, I feel I have lost all my anchors in the past. It brings about great existential questions like, "If my remembered past is remembered wrong, am I still who I think I am?" and then "Should I be me or someone else?".

The answers may seem obvious to the reader. I however, have had a heck of a time trying to even match words to the feeling and now that I have perhaps, I hope, the answers will feel obvious and real. But the truth is, I still feel the weight of those questions and others wearing me down inside much more strongly than I feel their counterparts. This wont be forever, I hope; but if I am extra exhausted in these coming days, it is because I am trying so hard to remember history that no one else wants to and I do not always remember the value of.

I have tried to see 
the world through your eyes;
but they are closed.
There is nothing there.
If I could but see the pictures
painted on your sleeping eyelids,
maybe I could understand.


Tell me,
could you wake if you wanted to?
Your sleeper's life must be so beautiful
to have held you asleep for so long.
So much more beautiful 
than your memories of this waking life.


You told me once that you
no longer remembered
anything but your somnambulance 
and I wept.
I cried the tears you could not.
I cried until the clouds above 
were tired of my rain.


I wept because you will never know 
the color of my sky
and I do not quite remember 
the color of your eyes.
I imagine them to be the same though,
your eyes and my sky,
the one forgotten by the other
and yet the same stardust and storm.


I wish I could see the world
and your own sky 
through your eyes,
sleepy as they may be.
But there is one problem.
I am wide awake.

Coby? Koby? Colby? ...

Coby was still drunk when we met him. We may have woken him up as we stood by the car talking about lunch and passing off the responsibility to make decisions and plans. He had spent the night in a doorway not far from our church, passed out. He was strangely pleasant, though a bit bewildered by the fact that someone had stolen his shoes. I understood then that he had not been homeless in Portland for long.

We have so many homeless people and the competition between them only increases in the dry (drier) summers when the more transient population comes in and passes through. It is worse here than in a lot of cities I think. More than that, in the two years I have been here, the corners and bridges seem to be filling up steadily with an increasing population. Portland is simultaneously an easy city to be homeless in and a difficult one.

It is true more often than not what they teach you if you volunteer with homeless people for long, "everyone is from somewhere else." And everyone almost always is. It is part of the process. And so I have a habit of asking where they are from. He said Seattle. In fact, this was his first night in Portland. And someone stole his shoes. He said he had never walked outside without shoes before and that it hurt. (I didn't know what to do with that...but I hate wearing shoes. It is a luxury I have though to take my shoes off and know that they will still be in my closet when I decide I need them.) We found him some water in the church and asked around for some shoes. No luck. Nobody was even the right size.

Eventually we decided to drive Kolby to the Rescue Mission to look for shoes and to get him connected. Hopefully, to get him into a recovery program...but he would have to want it. And I am not sure he did. If my hasty judgments were correct, he was chronically homeless and chronically in and out of prison with a host of prison tattoos to show. I wonder how it all started. And I wonder if he even knows how it started. But that is not the point.

Colby wasn't shy or reserved like so many people tend to be. There was no way Betty would have ever gotten in my car, especially since there were so many of us when I met her. And it's not just her, there is a common thread of mistrust among people who are reduced to hourly survival. Admittedly, Koby was less than sober, but still. It surprised me.

So I wonder. I wonder why he let us take him anywhere. And I wonder if he really wanted help or if he just wanted us to feel good so he could go live his own form of life. I wonder if he was puzzled by us or if he had met us church people before and knew exactly what he had to do to make us feel like we may had made a difference so we could continue on to home and lunch and all of the constructs of a life that either he has no appreciation for or which had no appreciation for him at some pivotal point. School. Work. Bills. Family. Friends. Dinner. Get stuff. Get rid of stuff.

I cannot help but wonder if all of my intentions were misread for naivety, which would be true in part. (I have more curiosity and enthusiasm than I do experience.) Or if there was no reading into things at all and he just took things as they came. I want so badly to know, though, how it all looked through his blurry eyes.