memory

Ten days ago, my birthday came and went in quarantine. I am still recovering from it. It was like a wormhole, connecting me to a hundred memories and feelings related, specifically, to that day – to people and places that were and are gone – or gone to me.

In the days surrounding my birthday, Nabokov came to walk beside me. The master of memory, he saturated my walks with hues of blues and sunsets. I found myself thinking, particularly, of a quote from one of his short stories, but when I went to look for it, I realized that I had conflated the quote from one story with the ending of another. Which direction should I go?

The book, itself, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, is one I have been reading since 2009. My page marker – the stub of an Amtrak ticket from Boston’s North Station to Portland, Maine – rests, presently, between pages five-hundred-ten and five-hundred-eleven. Over the years, I have read the stories mindfully, aware that they are finite. What will I do when I reach the end?

I recall, when I was very small, my mother telling me of a woman she knew who would read the final page of every book she began, just in case she died before she finished. Now, I’m wondering if I’ve conflated that memory of my mother’s retelling with her own confession.

That’s memory for you.

…were I a writer, I should allow only my heart to have imagination, and for the rest rely upon memory, that long-drawn sunset shadow of one’s personal truth. – Nabokov, “Spring in Fialta