Reading the Waves: A Memoir

Joy Harjo: “Memory is a living being that moves in many-layered streams. It is not static. It is not a backwards look. It moves forward, sideways, and in a spiral.”

I was sticking to my story, unwilling to let the story become or move. I mean, if I let them go, who would I be?

Not to rehash, but to reshape.

Memories are conjurings.

My job is to go to Subway to secure some sandwiches for us. I’m absolutely pretending everything is fine even though my heart feels like it is dropping out of my vagina. This is the actual cleaving. Miles is leaving home. Miles is inventing his own idea of home. Our triad is dissolving. Or that’s what it feels like.

you story, destory, and restory your life, and create your own map. At the interstices of our lives, we trade stories and secrets, we take turns helping each other go on. May these shared moments and rituals for release and revivification raise your own sweet solaces.

There’s the fact that the story isn’t “mine,” but writers are never stopped by that thin membrane.

The mind-fuck has to do with the idea that memory is both embodied and disembodied. The stories we collect and repeat exist in a kind of narrative sphere that is a little apart from our bodies. Ancestral stories, generational stories take on lives of their own. Memory inhabits us and we inhabit memory—as if there is a story realm we step into and o

a kind of creative conjuring.