People Collection

He had sad eyes; the edges turning watery and crimson as emotion scraped at his voice. I stored up his face and the brief part of his story that greedily ate up my time. His mess splashed onto my empty day, smearing my memory with this moment captured forever in my subconscious.

Life has always been about collections for me. As a child I watched what my older sisters collected to know how to pattern my own hordes of treasure. They had to have known what was valuable; they were older. So I gathered the usual: stamps, coins, marbles and added a few of my own: rocks, bugs and pine cones. We moved when I when I was nine and my mother made me downsize. I've been emptying my pockets ever since.

Several years ago I began to collect people, or parts of people through the random parts that they slough off of themselves. They pack better than rocks. I never know why they choose me. I wonder if its random or if someone whispered my secret- that I would collect their memories and preserve them. Usually through the course of the conversation they stop in bewilderment, wondering why they are talking to me. Sometimes they look at me accusingly, questioning how I invaded this private memory.

Norman, or the one with the sad eyes, was so uncertain when I met him. He was wavering between worlds of decisions, weights of pain straining down on his tired shoulders. He lived in moderate poverty while his eldest son ignored his need and paid off other men's mortgages- in cash. He dwelt on suicidal notions as his youngest son bordered on sociopath, absently recalling the story of an idiot that blew off his face but couldn't even finish the job. He was always a selfish child. Norman shared that he too sometimes thought of suicide. His son has told him to make sure he aims right.

I think that the part of Norman that was my favorite to collect was his love. I remember his face as he remembered “a bit of a girl” that he went with in his thirties. He “should have married that girl”, he'd thought that ever since. Regret, a tantalizing emotion, sweet as they remember what they've loved, and bitter as they realize that it is no longer there. I feel as if I'm peering in a wound as they live through it all again, all in the speed of a breath.

Norman told me how he'd poured all he had into his boys. He was their punching bag as he taught them to box, their teacher as he taught them to carve out usefulness with their hands. He gave them what he could, allowed them their stubborn mistakes, watching them occasionally coming back to the answer he'd invested in them. He always wanted them to surpass him in every way. His eyes had teared again as he wondered what had gone wrong, and then proud resolve would try to return as he told me that if nothing else he had taught them to defend their women. Whether they won or not was not important, just that they stood up. He told me he guessed that's what it was all about. Even if for him there was no longer a woman and the one that had been worth the fight had left forty years ago.

While we talked he would forget what I had showed him five minutes earlier, yet the past seventy years were as clear as if he'd just lived them. He said he was just old and confused. I think the past just pushed out the trivial present.

He shook as his back grew tired, the cane unable to give him strength. He would sit his punished body into a chair, the pack of cigarettes bulging in his t-shirt pocket. Now he punished his mind and heart and none of the pain could save him. I can't save him either, but I will store away his pain.