#AMREADING: ANGELA PALM’S MEMOIR RIVERINE.
Angela
Palm’s memoir reads like a novel. You keep waiting for a plot to develop, for
something to happen to the heroine that will create the familiar story arc, but
all that’s happening are thoughts and observations in beautiful language.
Childhood
Angela consults a map and finds that she lives in
between two red dots indicating towns, like
some half-breed spawn of both worlds and alien to both.
Neither
town wants her. She is stunned by this new perspective. Everything I saw was familiar – driveways and houses I’d seen before.
These were signs of home, but I felt spat out like bad milk.
Because
her house is so far from town, solitary
pursuits replaced social ones, and a cacophony of ideas swirled in me.
There was, from a
young age, already a disconnect between the way I processed experiences and the
way others conducted themselves, the way I was critical of my surroundings and
the way others seemed to float through them without taking note of anything.
Teenage
years
We knew the land as
we knew our teenaged bodies. Ripe, firm. Yielding in places. In those days,
running was nothing but an extension of self. Like breathing. There was no
labor in it, only direction and the feeling of blood rushing in our veins.
She
falls in love – if love was a pull,
magnetic and inevitable as gravity. If it was a secret, best kept slow and
steady and unspoken.
Returning
home after twenty years
I wondered which part
is most real – the conscious or the unconscious. Whether the place itself is
the thing that stays, or its effects on a person. One is concrete and one is
embedded in the brain, in memory.
Image: www.sophisticateddorkiness.com
