“Hey babes, I got the wordle in two this morning…”
At six-something in the morning with the sun already bright and streaming through the windows, I scrolled social media and the news. Someone shared a poem, someone shared their outrage, someone shared that they solved the morning Wordle and now they feel invincible, someone shared a funny meme.
I went about my morning. Waffles and coffee, and eventually, more coffee. I played around with paragraphs written here and there, paragraphs on this and that – mostly outrage or disconnection, a little humor, all digression. Babes. The term of endearment stuck in the back of mind. Another digression.
One of my exes and I called each other babes – all the time. Reading the word sent me back – not to that relationship but to others. Mentally, I searched: high school girlfriend, marriage, other girlfriends. I couldn’t remember any pet nicknames or any of the cute/kind ways in which we addressed each other. Surely, we addressed each other in cute and playful ways, right? Nothing came to mind. I don’t remember ever using hon, or dear, or love, or pookie. I also don’t remember formally addressing each other by our first names – which, as I said the names in my head, seemed foreign and weird. It made me wonder if we addressed each other at all. Did we talk without greetings? Were we talking at each other? Was not addressing each other, playfully or formally, a form of taking each other for granted? I had to acknowledge that in at least one or two instances – relationships that came after the marriage but before and after the babes relationship – not embracing or finding an endearing salutation was probably semi-deliberate but subconsciously so. To me, we weren’t there – calling each other pet names didn’t feel natural. I avoid things that feel forced or unnatural.
Babes. For me, it’s a term that implies both closeness and consistency, a familiarity like an inside joke. It could easily be followed by a request, “Babes, could you grab some good bread on your way home?” or a statement, “Hey babes, I gotta stop at the thing and do that thing today.” or just a simple what’s up, “hey babes, thinking about you, hope your day is going well.”
Admittedly, I was fond of it – the whole babes thing. And yet, as I’ve written elsewhere, that type of familiarity, comfort, or ease with someone else has, over the year, become increasingly difficult to envision. I don’t actively seek it or avoid it, nor can I imagine it. It’s as though there’s an unintentional distance that’s grown between that version of myself and this current version of myself. Or perhaps it’s the opposite. Perhaps, it’s a closeness and comfort with the self that’s taken root and made it difficult to envision something different. Either way, the term feels frozen in time – not quite archaic, but removed from my vernacular. And because I can’t remember other instances of mutual ease and affection, such a connection seems like a foreign language – seems like a land that I once visited and to which I might or might not return depending on my emotional budget.
But it was the memory and/or lack of memory that intrigued me. Will there be a time, ten or fifteen years from now (assuming I still have most of my wits about me), when seeing the word term babes won’t jog my memory? When I won’t recall it as an affectionate moniker I once used and was used for me? What is it that makes some things stay in our memory and others vanish? Repetition and revisiting? Presence? A good story? Trauma? Triumph? Are we doomed to forget experiences we’ve had when distance and time do their thing? And what about sharing – so many of the experiences I’ve had with people who I once knew seem blurred and faded.
I recently learned that a woman I knew, a friend and colleague of my ex wife, a woman who was a few years younger than us, passed away earlier this week. I hadn’t hear or seen her name in years. I think we went to her wedding. I’m pretty sure she came to ours. How can I not remember if I went to someone’s wedding? It might have been in New Jersey. I vaguely remember having a party favor with their name on it somewhere in the junk drawer or on a shelf, maybe bubbles, maybe a cup or a mug or a shot glass. Maybe it was a different friend. Maybe I’m misremembering the whole thing. And that’s the tricky thing with memory. Without reinforcing it, without the retelling, our memories seem destined to gather moss and decompose. If we went to the wedding, I don’t know that my ex or I talked about it or recalled it in the years afterwards.
That in and of itself is an odd, if not disturbing, thing to realize – that entire parts of my life have been, and are being excised from my memory, and if not part of my present day experiences are almost guaranteed to slowly vanish. It’s a little unsettling to think that time is this fire in the brain slowly consuming our memories, and we’re never sure what’s burning much less how to save it. Fading are the annual picnics and parties that ended as a result of breakups or divorce or neglect. The names of people who were once friends disappear.
…
It’s now a day or two after I started writing this. Sunshine once again fills my apartment. The morning coffee is almost gone. In re-reading what I’ve written, I’ve paused many times. I’ve played with the associations I’ve built through memory. What began as a small meditation on a term of endearment sent me rummaging through the burning files in my mind. Mostly, I thought of travel… places I’ve been and the people with whom I shared those experiences: Clarksdale, Savannah, a back-woods cabin in Virginia, a Baltic Cruise, Italy, San Diego, Charleston, DC and Baltimore. The common thread seems to be the uniqueness of the experience and the ability for words and phrases to trigger memory. I don’t know if those places will always be associated with those people. I don’t know if babes will always be babes, or if novelty becomes memory’s eraser, history’s revisionist.