4 April 2015

Stephanie Zavas

In Search of Lost Time

A Memory

I can’t remember when the flowers appeared in the heating vents of my old Volkeswagen, but I left them there. Wherever they came from, they came at a time when the sun still warmed the earth and the breeze blew soft and satiny. This mind of mine, a time capsule, a storage unit frozen with age, recollects, at the most unpredictable of times, memories that are not just images of previous encounters with songs, roads, love, struggles… They barrel through my eyes, through all of my senses in an overwhelming vacuum-bag of life-times. I see and feel days in an instant, yesterday and coinciding with years past, a past and present imperative plagues the future with a sandy fog– the Dust Bowl of my dreams. In these moments I despair, rejoice, panic, hate, and fall in love. Time warps and fades, and I expand and contract across dimensions, I become dimensionless.

What form do memories take? Is there a universe where they repose, waiting, existing, remembering a time when they had yet to transcend this world in me. If it is so then my memories refuse enlightenment. They seek refuge in the moments when I see a familiar place, a long forgotten snowflower, trapped in the heating vent of my car.

I’ve moved a lot in my life, from just being poor and all kinds of other issues, to foster care, to some other sad stuff that is, you know, just the way life goes. But in this situation, I had moved back to an old foster home, having dropped out of college and moved away to Los Angeles which wasn’t healthy for a multiplicity of reasons. When I noticed those flowers, preserved and lingering, for how long and for how many cross-country trips I’ve taken trying to find my home, I discovered a fascination with memory, and and how one reconciles memory and time . It was a pleasurable thing, so innocent and beautiful, these flowers which endured through death, dread, enchantment, mountain passes, grassy plains, deserts and country roads, circumnavigating the country with me through every kind of weather and season.