near but not palpable

(this text is gonna explain a video project I am doing later on)I drive over the same road each morning, in the same car, in the same direction. Each moment my car advances, the tree-line shifts slightly. The road crawls out from beneath my car in the most predictable manner. I have seen these moving images through the sturdy frame of my windshield so often that my eyes are almost blind to them. I anticipate them before they arrive. As I drive forward the horizon pulls my car along. The road through some unspoken seemingly magical process takes ahold of my arms, leading them gently over it's curvature. The gravity of habit overwhelms my body to the extent that my mind is completely elsewhere.

I loose myself in familiarity. The car's interior molds itself to me. It suits me so well that I become numb to the boundary of my skin against the leather car seat. It is in this state that every now and then I awake to a contradictory sensation.

I look down and peer out at myself; or at least the part that I can see in parallel to the frame of the windsheild. I notice the rims of my glasses, the periphery of my dark brown hair, my brown driving gloves, the frame of my heavy bodied station wagon all at once.

All the sudden I think of my mother. I think of her similar dark thick hair, her similar dark blue station wagon, her similar metal framed glasses, and of course the driving gloves which I admit to purchasing in remembrance of her.

Only in this strange moment, I feel as if parts of my body remember her in a way my head cannot. Only for this split second on my way elsewhere, I feel as if some parts of me belong to her memory. My face is still my own. My face, which in conversation with others, constantly stays aware of itself in its attempts to mimic and respond to the outside world. But the parts of me, like the back of my head, seem to belong to her instead. After all each strand of my hair is linked to her by DNA. Even its future is in her hands; when will that first patch of silver appear? It is only in these slight moments when I am looking at myself, detached from sense of place within my body that her ghost-like memory visits me.

A long time ago in the garden, by the mint leaves, beside her house, she told me how as a child she would recite prepositions: above, below, around, about, beside. She never explained to me (or at least not to my memory) what her attachment was to these words although she did continue to recite them to me now and again (she had memorized many poems which she also would recite to me if that makes this particular antidote any less strange). To this day I cannot quite understand what drew a woman was so at odds with being in body to these words that tie themselves so intimately with human subjectivity. Yet when I remember her, I come to realize that memory has a place too, in a nearby territory just beyond where words describe.