The Legend of the Utakata Poems

I don’t know if this story is true, or at what point I started telling it to myself. I’m sure I started out just wanting to make something beautiful. Unfortunately, for anyone that intends to read the rest of this babbling text, I started wondering why.
This month Laura Ashley sofa covers spark existential dread and IBS flirts with possible early onset Alzheimer’s.

I have always been worried about forgetting things. Not little things like, ‘Where the f$%k1n5 hell are my car keys?’ or ‘Did I leave the iron on?’ (Jokes - I haven’t ironed anything since 2003)
Big things.
Things that I worry might make me, me.

How long did I feel like skipping for, after kissing my wife for the first time? Did I reassure my younger sister when we left our childhood home for the last time? When was the last time I had a truly excellent poo?
The older I get, the more I want to fish for these character forming memories but they are whisked away, just under the surface of the torrential river of time and they refuse to nibble on my maggots.

I panic that photos I never took would have made tastier memory bait, but photos are never enough. Especially when they’re splattered across data centers in Amazon’s US-East Northern Virginia cloud region.
Anyway, I don’t actually want a picture of the grotesque sofa cushions my brother and I built dens with, I want to be able to close my eyes and feel their texture as he collapses it on my squealing face.

If I can’t vividly remember these things, am I forgetting who I am?
Or perhaps why I am?
Of course I will have new memories, but I don’t want Gary the speed awareness instructor to outshine my best friend when I was 6. (Different Gary. I think.)

Does everyone have this, or am I just not experiencing things at the time as fully or deeply as I should be?
Is there a veil between me and the realness of life that, no matter how hard I concentrate, stops me absorbing everything?
(Not helped, of course, by omniscient algorithms, designed to so effectively capture my attention that I forget what I mean to do every time I pick up my phone.)

‘Oh Yawn, yeah blame tiktok grandad, what does this have to do with the Legend prints?’
Good question.

In the Garden of Edo, the Legends volunteer to take part in a ritual.
They choose to root themselves to the earth.
There’s a ceremony. Burobbu singing. It’s giving joyful melancholy.

Over time they become trees that bloom with neon flowers (the ones that attract the magical memory butterflies…) that keep the whole world running.
They sacrifice something of themselves, but in doing so become part of the fabric of the world and help the story continue, even if it means they change in the process.

Maybe they’re about a longing for rootedness, or getting older, or being able to expand beyond the borders of oneself? Maybe all of it at once.
I am afraid that what makes me me is stitched loosely together from fragments of story, easily unpicked in a world of outsourced memory.
But the Legends are brave. Perhaps they let go of ‘I’, make space for ‘we’, and create something more permanent. Maybe that is the magic that powers the world?

Oh dear god I just cringed so hard I think I’ve pulled a muscle, but if offering yourself to something bigger isn’t beautiful I don’t know what is.