The oar is a spoon stirring the soup of the river.
Kinderton has warned me that this stirring is unsettling, that each moment has a renewed potential to evoke memories, to wake the dead or bring these past lovers to life.

It is not long before I smell something familiar, a perfume or perhaps a melange of perfume, hair conditioner, skin creams, perhaps, I imagine, even the undercoating of base foundation to mascara. A bottle hits me in the head.

"There you are, Marsaw! Why did you run away?" I recognise the voice immediately as Helen's. Her voice resounds in accusation before the pain of the bottle hitting my head has even registered.

"I didn't run away," I correct into the darkness. "You drove me away. Is it any surprise? You announce your presence by throwing a bottle at me..."

The human voice, or perhaps in the instant case it is only Helen's voice, manifests into a recognisable timbre yet at the same time, dependant upon the memory. It is not her voice that I recognise. Instantly I am travelling through an assortment of memories, a cacophony of different variations in the lung's output to vibrate the vocal chords; in anger, passion, tenderness.

The accusatory tone amends the articulators into one recognisable pitch but I find myself battling against those particular memories, attempting to will her form into one less intrusive, a non-combative confluence. I am fighting to gain control of a memory as I wish to experience it.

The memories, years of them accumulated, do not envelope me in a flood, a surge to drown me. In fact I find it quite difficult to mine them individually. These precious stones have been buried for years and the sediment of time is difficult to dig through.

Instead of the tenderness I am intending to find I unearth only lust. Sexual images. I cannot recall each moment of fucking individually. Rather it is a collage of moments, a sexual summary; mild, mometary sadomasochistic instances. A perfect companion, I see, to the incessant conflict between us.

But I am confused about the chronology of appearances. One moment I was reliving what appeared to be a teenage memory and the next moment I am experiencing the full-blown possibilities of adult passion; lust and rage.

"You were always a coward, Marsaw." she continued bitterly.

"You wanted me to feign choking you during sex," I countered.

"You cheated on me over and over again!"

"You accused me of cheating before the thought had ever entered my mind. Your accusations were subliminal encouragement. You wanted me to cheat on you simply so you could accuse me of cheating on you. If anyone was the coward it was you; constructing imaginery, paranoid scenarios to avoid the reality of your emotions...."

"You tried to choke me to death...."

"It was the passion of the moment...exotic asphixiation. The lower supply of oxygen to the brain was supposed to enhance your sexual sensation..."

It was quite amazing that from nothing, from a blank sketchbook of memory this one of Helen suddenly arose with no subtlety in the same way she must once have become a part of my daily life. One moment there was no Helen and life was endurable. The next moment Helen had inserted herself or perhaps it was I that had inserted her, into my daily subconscious. And the moment after that, she was gone.

Kinderton stirred at my side. "Is it you who is judging the memory or the memory that is judging you?"

"I would have liked to have remembered her in a more pleasant light but..."

******

And so it went across this river. On occasion I thought I could hear a voice of another lover. False alarms or mere faintnesss of memory? How richly each memory was transformed was dependent entirely on the richness of each interaction.

Some were overnight, nearly anonymous couplings. These were like a simple inhalation or exhalation. The rhythm of existence. Yet even one night stands had memories. Sometimes the shape of a breast, the height and width of a nipple, the texture of skin. These were human beings with whom I'd exchanged bodily fluids. Should they have had a weightier importance? The act of fucking strangers created no more memory than the act of masturbation. What if every individual sperm ejactulated in masturbation had been a potential human being? Ah, there was no danger in creating another being from a handful of sperm. Yet I found myself considering the individual histories I did not know behind each individual I'd slept with. I felt a sadness, a loss of what could have been. The potential of deeper memories evaporated.

Yet fucking in and of itself was not the potential. Was every girl I'd ever slept with a potential lover? Perhaps if I'd selected more carefully, more purposefully.

"Your ego always got in the way of your heart." Kinderton reminded, as though he could read my thoughts.

But just as I'd begun to think all hope was lost, that the connection to memory was a futille endeavour which would only create a history of disappointments, a timeline of futility, I heard another voice calling me, growing clearer and more musical with each push of the oar through the waters.

*****

"I'm not ready for heartbreak," I warned Kinderton. "I'm feeling too fragile."

"You could have escaped at any time. But you were like that proverbial child putting its hand in fire. In your case, you rarily learned the lesson of the sensation of painful heat for very long..."

"The heart must be a very flexible and reilient instrument."

It was Pamela in shadows, slowly emerging.

"Pamela," I whispered in a gradual awe all over again.

"I remember you fondly, Marsaw," she said, still a mere outline before me. "Despite yourself you had moments of singular beauty..."

"What happened to us?"

"What happens to any of us who embark on a relationship that does not take? A word imagined but not uttered."

"But we shared so many conversations. We spoke of the memory of so many tender moments....how did we begin to embark on such a journey without completing it?"

"We did complete it, Marsaw. Sharing a relationship never meant sharing "The" relationship. Fate does not determine the ending, merely the beginning."

"But I loved you..."

"You did say those words many times and in that specific order and yes, so did I. But such a phrase is merely an incantation and if repeated frequently enough it begins to take on the shape of reality even if it is only a temporal reality...."

Her form was now completely visible yet it was in a constant state of flux. There was a repeated tryptich of forms; the vulnerable Pamela, the playful Pamela and the Pamela of so many indecipherable moments. I was uncertain of which spector I was speaking to.

"Didn't you love me?"

"Of course I did, Marsaw. Just not eternally. You confused fate with destiny."

Her transforming physical forms were the embodiment of memories over time. How she appeared the first time I ever met her. How she appeared as we shared the most intimate moments of our history together. How she appeared, diminishing, at the end...