Ellie Musgrave

I was listening to a song that I used to listen to in the car with my dad, a song we listened to when I’d drive around Maryland with him between my freshman and sophomore year of college. I was nineteen and I remember trying to make my dad understand me. Looking back on the memory of the sky through the windshield, I missed the time when it was only me that my dad had trouble understanding.

When I began to consider how my dad’s memory began to falter more in recent months, I began to see the world differently. I grappled with the fact that my memory becomes a void as I collect more of it, and things I’ve assembled in my mind, associations I’ve made, become an intricately strung web that spreads out for miles.

There are anchors: I keep finding my feet in places like the too-green grass outside the baseball stadium behind my high school, or the pavement that winds along the park by the house I grew up in. In returning to these places, in looking a bit differently, I create new memories and associations. I find my dad sitting on my sister’s new couch, though in the same Virginia sun we both run back to any chance we get. I find Lowell again in our space in the parking lot, but I have the memory of his funeral in my periphery.

And, as I revisit, time passes. Futures spin out around me as I fumble with the past and present. The unsteadiness in these images alludes to the possibility of change, a sea of uncertainties ahead.