Megan’s Reviews > Sunbirth > Status Update

Could homes be moved and reassembled? What about the water marks on the ceilings, the warped wood, the smells soaked into the furniture? How could we have brought that with us? What about the lives that were lived within them, the words spoken and bounced off the walls, the people who added and subtracted to the place? How could we possibly pick all of that up and drop it somewhere else, expecting it to be the same?

I couldn’t understand why I had to be protected, why the youngest must always be the child, and why all the people around me believed in the illusion that it was a privilege to live without knowledge. I couldn’t see how ignorance could ever be the safest state of existence.

The mind is a dangerous construct. What a paradoxical state of existence we’re in, where our minds can stretch across dimensions, deep into reality and far into fiction, assign meaning to everything, yet our bodies are so small and limited that I can’t touch the roof of my room. Even a marble could kill us if it hit the right spot.

‘We never get to say goodbye,’ she said. ‘Even when we know they are going to die, we still don’t really have the wisdom to accept that any conversation could be our last. So we wait until they’re gone and then it’s too late to say anything.’
Was it really wisdom that we didn’t have? I thought. Was it not courage?
‘Sometimes,’ I said, ‘goodbye isn’t something you say out loud.’

Who are we if not just a collection of memories locked in a container of flesh and blood? If we ceased to exist in the memory of those closest to us, then how could we assume that we were as alive as we’d been before? It made me realise that, despite what people said about it, death was not so straightforward after all.

As people grow up, childhood becomes foggy, but no matter who you ask, they always remember the weather. They forget the locations of their schools, the names of their best friends, the colours of their houses, but never the weather. Perhaps it is the tactility of the air touching skin that makes it impossible to forget. We remember with our bones, our muscles, our skin.

Time stretches everything thin. Change is a creature that crawls.