I could close my eyes and picture every blind corner, every tree, and every stop sign between here and my parent’s house. My grandmother died in her sleep when I was 18, and I can still picture her soft eyes, much like my Dad’s and the sturdy way she upheld her emotions when someone brought up my Papa, who’d passed on years before after a horrible battle with cancer. And before he passed on, I still remember the way he would holler “JoJo” at her, and she’d come bustling down the long hallway and dig around in the icebox for the rainbow sherbet on summer afternoons. And as I pick up my cell phone to dial, I realize I no longer have the number stored, but it doesn’t matter…
Because I know it by heart. Hours, days and weeks can tick away the moments. Your mind can move on and put new memories on top of the old, creating layers of sediment like the Grand Canyon. Ninety-nine phone numbers stored in the cell phone can become eighty-seven and jump back up to ninety-eight because real life can erase the past, and what was once reality becomes something you reminisce about.
But regardless of the fact that life keeps moving forward, some thing’s you just know by heart. It seems no matter what comes your way, which direction you walk, or where your path leads you, you’ll always remember the way home, you’ll always remember the way your grandparents loved you and you’ll always remember that one phone number you keep trying to forget.
Is knowing by heart a blessing or a curse? Are there things in life that would be better suffocated by the sediment, unable to rise to the surface in a moment of frailty?
How does our soul determine which things affected us deeply enough to be saved in that special unforgettable spot? It’s a hard drive that never gets rewritten, regardless of how many new experiences we melt on top of it; it’s a place that lives suspended in a time, a phone number that never gets erased.
Perhaps in that moment, the love and connection we feel is so profound that it pings off the stars and lands on the wings of an angel, and maybe that angel brings it back to us just when we need it.
There’s no words, except to say, I just know it by heart.