I have a fascination with moments, and how moments carry meaning from other moments within them.
All those memories we carry with us – the truly intense ones – come along not simply because of those moments themselves, but because of what happened around them, or what they meant later. And I’m not talking about the obvious stuff. It took me ages to start enjoying Sudoku again, quite recently, because I associated it with an old, long-lived trauma.
But it could be something less direct, like my most enduring memory of my late uncle being watching him shave in front of the mirror when I was a kid, because that was when he offered to buy me a bicycle that my mother couldn’t afford by herself – a bike that, sadly, was stolen a few months after I got it. But that image of my uncle shaving – that’s a moment that speaks to me of love.
I keep coming back in my writing to such moments. I think I’ve finished or started at least five stories entirely about moments like these, of illumination or elision.
Here’s one such story that I posted to my blog. A few readers assumed it was autobiographical, because of the kind of detail chosen. It’s not, but I like to think of that as a compliment in this case.