Remembering: Losing Parts of Yourself and the Process to Rebuild It Complete
Image: Isis Putting Osiris Back Together (source unknown)
When casting a glance back into the past, far behind, the fractured remnants of my memories seem to live on like ghosts. I remember a time and place, the drab structure of my old high school, the sunlight filtering through the branches of the lone mango tree in the front yard of my old house, how I drove the empty roads of Kuala Lumpur in my beat-up grey Proton Iswara late at night, or too early in the morning, looking for adventure, solace or escape.
I remember looking at certain people I'd only just met, and wondering if I could leave a piece of myself with them if we ever parted ways. The romantic in me always persuaded me to. The realist in me convinced me I could not.
It would be like dismembering myself. The poet Aracelis Girmay wondered something similar. Parts of my body strewn here and there, shed like dead skin, and I would lay in wait for an Isis to recover those pieces and re-member me like she did for Osiris time and time again so that I could be whole again.
But real life is not like Egyptian mythology. Or is it?
I suppose it is like when people say they want to find themselves and feel they have to go on a physical journey to do so, when in fact a person can find what they need in the people in their lives, past and present, or their memories. I am cautious, because the thought of leaving pieces of myself with different people is a devastating one, for I constantly think about the importance of the self as being complete, and a piece of yourself is not exactly something, like a book, or a sweater you can ask from an old friend, partner, or family member, “Can I have it back?”
The late science fiction author Philip K. Dick was born with a twin sister, Jane, who died a few weeks after her birth. The loss of his twin affected him for the rest of his life and is apparent in the recurring motif of a phantom twin in many of his novels.
I tend to think that was a way to always have a part of him that he had lost present and alive, a way to re-member with a missing piece of himself. And when he died, he was buried beside his twin sister, under a tombstone that had been made fifty-three years earlier with his name already inscribed, waiting until the day he would be reunited with her.
