severance

A year ago today, I threw the urn into the Seine river.

For an onlooker, it must have been a curious, if unmistakable sight. A stranger extricating himself from some powerful fetish. A lover's talisman, perhaps. The ashes of a deceased relation. Sacred writings never to be spoken.

The vessel, denoting now an entire world of meaning, was all these. Possibly more.

It was supposed to have been a gift of a high symbolic order: a representation of the internal ironies of our relationship. She the remorseless being of the eternal present. I the wretch that would bleed to death on the lacerations of the past. As such, it required an equally symbolic act. A measure with such conviction could mean only irreparable severance.

It wasn't enough.

In the Marquesas, they speak of tribes which, without means of the necessary totems, tattoo their history on the eldest child -- a procedure some do not survive. I, too, was without need of a historical relic of some past idolization, the memories permanently scarred across my psyche.

Every night I uncoil the threads of events past, like Penelope unweaving the shroud of Laertes; a process born less of nostalgia than a masochistic ritual of remembrance. Yearning for moments never to return.

I dropped the urn in the Seine, but somehow, a year later, I still haven't let go.