I can’t remember exactly where and when I heard this, but somewhere in the last year, I learned that Socrates never wrote things down.  In fact, he disliked the act of writing itself.

I’m not sure if this is common knowledge.  And if it is, maybe it’s just not as profound a fact to others as it is to me, but this revelation, especially living in the times we are in, really took me by surprise.

One of the greatest thinkers in all of history didn’t endeavor to write down his own thoughts and philosophies?  I found this remarkable.  Even more so when coupled with the fact that none of the words attributed to Socrates today were actually penned by him when he was alive.  Rather, it was only after his death that some of his words were transcribed by his students who, ironically, did their best to include his reservations about writing within their writings about him.

Apparently his dislike of writing stemmed, not from the practice itself, but from his love and appreciation for memory.

He believed writing did little more than to “implant forgetfulness in people’s souls,” preferring to practice the art of remembrance rather than the skill of writing.   In essence, Socrates thought the more we wrote things down, the less we “exercised” our own memory of the things we wrote about.  And, in turn, our memory itself would grow weaker and weaker over time.  He believed the memories we kept in our head and heart truly belonged to and became a part of us, while the ones we wrote down were reduced to “reminders” or remnants.

I guess his words stood out to me so much because, this year, I spent most of my time doing almost everything else except what I had prided myself in doing since you died: writing about you.

So much of the last seven (or has it been eight?) years had been spent in a near constant fever of scribbling into journals and onto scraps of paper, that the noticeable absence of the compulsion to write often brought with it feelings of something like guilt.  I guess that makes sense considering that for the better part of a decade, I had spent weekends digging into drawers and purses in attempts to excavate all the Post-its and journal entries scattered inside them so that I could somehow string and weave fragments and memories into poems, stories, and essays about that only thing I wanted to write about: you.

Looking back, I can see it now: how Socrates was right.  How writing, rather than being an exercise in memory,  became more an exorcism of it.  An attempt to purify it.  To implant a forgetfulness, not of you (never of you),  but of the ache of your loss.

I wanted so badly to write it all down, to somehow get it out of me, but the words just kept boiling up without an end in sight.  And in a way, writing about your death seemed to somehow keep you alive, so I kept doing it.   I even remember saying to a friend that the writings themselves felt like the exoskeletons of an emotional life in a constant state of rupture and change: so I just kept peeling away whenever the words would bubble up.

But somehow in the last year, it was like I finally reached new, fresh, living skin.

Like something new had been born.

And the words that once used to well up inside me, it’s not that they dried up or disappeared, but rather, that they began to rain down almost like manna from the sky.  And for the first time, when you would come up, when you would cross my mind, I wouldn’t reach for a pen to write you down anymore. Because no part of me wanted to create another remnant, another fragment, of you that would just sit lifeless on a page somewhere.  I wanted to keep the actual memory of you; to begin to practice a new art: the art of remembrance.

So a lot of things had to go without saying this year:

It had to go without saying that I missed you.  A lot.

It had to go without saying that you crossed my mind  a million different ways a million different times.

And it had to go without saying that the memory of you, all these years later, still managed to carry me through incredibly heart-rending and heart breaking times.

The ways in which you were somehow woven into the flowers, thorns, and thistles of all this last year brought with it had to go without saying, because even if I had wanted to write any of it down, this year brought me to  a place I thought I’d never reach: to the limits of my own words.  To a place where I could see that the depth and scope of life itself had finally outpaced my ability to write meaningfully about it.

So it all went without saying.  And what, to others, must have looked like a year of forgetting was actually the first year of really remembering you.

In a way, running up against the limits of my words seemed to  deepen and strengthen the ones I’d already penned down.  I guess that’s the beauty of limits.  That they act like a frame for a hallowed image.

I guess that’s the peace that comes with simply letting things be left unsaid.

It makes me wonder if the same thing can be said for all the words left unspoken and unsaid between us: if they’re somehow all the more valuable because there will never be more.

You won’t believe this, but there is actually a technology which lets people have that: it lets them have more of the words they never thought they’d hear.   Apparently people can upload voicemails and video samples of a dead loved one, and then type out a message they want to hear.  Within minutes their message will be played back in a replica of their dead loved one’s voice.

There’s even an advertisement which shows a young widow listening to a likeness of her deceased husband’s voice.  It’s telling her that it’s proud of her.

There’s no limit to what people can get these replicas to repeat.  None.

I have so many of your voicemails saved.  And videos.  I have so many patches and pieces of you that I know that if I wanted to, If I wanted to damn myself, I could quilt some portion of you back together.  I could dilute you into a never ending consumable substance; a murky stream of endless words. I could make my own graceless attempt at a resurrection…

I could hear apologies I thought I was owed.  And have conversations we never got to share.

I could hear what it might have sounded like if you’d been given the time to propose…

I could have it; I could have more.

I could remove the frame  and push past the limits of the time we shared.  I could expand and reshape our image into whatever I could dare to make it: I could pull you back into time itself and watch a masterpiece turn, little by little, into something that more resembles a child’s drawing scribbled onto a wall.

It turns out that “more” has a cost no sane person could ever be willing to pay: the cheapening of what was.

So it’s okay that  things went unsaid between us.  That some things were left unresolved and some words left unsaid and unspoken.  (Because some things always are).

I can accept that.  This year was all about living under the boughs of that truth.

And with that acceptance a special kind of alchemy took place this year:  Somehow the desire for more, whether it was more time, more words, or just more you, somehow it morphed into the blessing of knowing that all of it was somehow more than enough.