Big Fractal Tangle: moments that define us

We go through life holding the dearest parts of ourselves hidden, and while a casual read of my "being real" section might make you think I'm somewhat open, there's an ocean of siphoned language and situation welled within me, which were it let loose, I imagine it'd explode like this summerstorm I'm now watching: lightning strikes and sheets of rain and numbing grayness, all around.

Why must the very most important moments in my memory remain unspoken, while the rest is only only chatter. Were you to spend enough time in our house, enough time so I'd forget you were here, you'd see and learn the look on my face when the grayness returned, when I fell back into the fathoms of unspeakable realness once again.

And what would I say? How could I speak about Chloe on the day that she died, how light she was when she could no longer walk, when I carried her in one arm while talking joyfully to the birth parents who'd chosen us. How can I tell you what I felt singing Happy Birthday to myself the last time I spoke to my mom, as she was too weak to sing.

What can we possibly say about the many moments that define us? How do we earn them? Where should they go?

As always, Rilke knows best:

For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, but it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open windows and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

Truth told, life is a rapturous wonderful thing. Remind me of this, okay?