Scientists and Sufjan Stevens, or Proverbs 23:7

This summer I had a job pulling invasive plants from the ground in Oregon. The work was monotonous and earthy and made an easy way for streaming thoughts and river-like conversations with a group of multiple personalities called "my co-workers." Joe, my boss at that job, was studying psychology at the University of Oregon. One of the dominating personalities, we would listen in interest and sometimes feigned interest to his acquired knowledge and professor-penned beliefs, but one morning our conversation found me in the midst of overgrown ivy. There are small moments where suddenly you see more, where mirrors are violently held up to your awareness and instead of a tree, there is the forest.

Everything that has happened to me is somewhere in me..
"I've always believed that we retain all of our memories, somewhere in us," I said to Joe, "It just seems natural. There are things we forget, but forgetting isn't erasing, is it?"
"But it is," He grabbed an ivy root and pulled, "Our long-term memory inexplicably holds onto some memories for indefinite amounts of time, even an entire life span, but most things it just lets go forever." Look at those big words, you can tell he goes to College.
"So memory is more a process of pencil, then permanent ink?" I live by metaphor.
"Maybe Lyndsay- at least that is what the scientists say."

Yesterday I woke up to a clean house. Caitlin had adjusted it for her (mostly) Canadian friends staying over night with us for the Sufjan Stevens concert that night. So I drew a picture for chapel and ran at the gym. We drove to Fred Meyer to pick out slippers for Tim's mom's birthday. The fuzzy kind. We drove again to Capital Hill to find old friends and secure hot lattes from Roy Street. Britta told Tim and I a story and I teared up a little bit while Tim couldn't get over the neighborhood's reminiscent feel of London. Back at the apartment the friends arrived with laughing and excitement and Canadian pride stamps. We played speed scrabble and it felt like Christmas break. I was more content than usual.
And then it was time for the concert.

Sufjan is a man who I have followed for some time now. I can't remember now who it was that first showed me his music, burned me a CD, scribbled down his lyrics on a piece of paper. Maybe you can? For my whole year of sixteen I fell asleep to his Illinois album; the blue light of my stereo flashing in my bedroom. When its walls were still painted tangerine. His songs transformed before me into anthems attached to the memories of my life. I asked the Canadians where they first heard his pearly voice. In a car, they said. With all the windows rolled down we listened to the Predatory Wasp of the Palisades over and over again.

At the concert I cried and danced and laughed. Sufjan took us on an electro-pop ballad adventure to some place outside of our contexts and our concepts, while still finding us intimately close at our own cores. "These are songs of heartache and mental illness, rendered through the phenomenon of the apocalypse," He explained,"There is no better way to view heartsickness than through the lens of end times. It's a little bit dramatic but it pays the bills." The crowd loved it, such a wonderful man...
During one of these moments Sufjan played his new track "Now That I'm Older," and the background changed into a quiet black screen. As the song moved on, tendrils of beautiful muted colors grew from the bottom left corner. I sat transfixed as the tendrils grew, overlapping each other to reach further up the screen, like an exotic, apocalyptic plant. I sat mesmerized as the trombones cleared the air and the piano dropped thick chords and they sang now. that. Im. Older. over and over again. I promise I couldn't move. Soon the the curling edges of the plant where reaching the edge of the screen and then moving past the screen to places we couldn't see. Each tendril coming from the left-corner-source, blotting out the ones underneath it, leaving a fine edge of green, blue, brown, on either side. The center of the tendril was cleared, a muted black.
"Its different now I think...
....Somewhere I lost what ever else I had
....I see it run inside itself...
..Someone else, can see it for myself
Now that I'm older..."

I sat in my seat and I cried. I wanted to be touched in that moment. I thought about Jesse and wondered if he had a enough time to fill the screen and maybe, maybe his tendrils never had to overlap and erase any of the others. Was there just enough space for all the colors to stay in their places? Before the Fire-lights glimmered and ceased.
Nothing is ever erased.