A Family Tree.

I have spent all day drawing up my family tree i.e my genealogical tree.
I tried assembling all the information together. Souvenirs, memories, faces, locations, names...some sort of a mental compendium of an oral and visual history.
What I heard, whom I met, what was said about who, who married who, where did they come from, their origins, their sect, their religion, where they ended up, their life stories...
I tried to go as far back as I can, gathering all these little pieces and sat down and sketched the family tree, starting with my great grandparents -both maternal and paternal.
It was not easy...
Some of them are already gone for good. Some I never really bothered to find out more about, some I took for granted, some were too distant physically and some emotionally out of reach, and some were a taboo subject...
I spent hours remembering names and faces...They were difficult, painful hours...
My immediate family was just a branch of this tree amongst many other branches but we were all attached to the same trunk. We all belonged to the same trunk.
I got tired after a while and stopped this exercise...But I was curious as to why I had started it in the first place. Why this sudden need to delve into my own personal roots...
I have no clear answers.
Maybe because I have been feeling like a leaf that has fallen, amongst many other leaves, kind of scattered "pêle-mêle."
Maybe because winds blew us away, apart from one another, sometimes ripping whole branches to the ground...
Maybe it my own feeble attempt to hang on to something solid...like an imaginary tree when my own grounds are so shaky, almost non existent.
So I sketch trees instead, family trees...
I remember a long time ago, I lived through an earthquake, everything shook and not knowing what to do, I held on to some wall only to feel the wall wobble and crack...
It is the same now. Everything around me feels like this wall - wobbly, cracked...Fractured.
I console myself with the thought that I, at least, have the memory of a Tree. Something to give me strength, verticality, and a sense of belonging even if it is on some fictional, imaginary level...

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