Buckshot

I still have footage of a bucks party for a marriage that has long-since fallen apart. I was supposed to edit it into a coherent video for the friends and family to gawk at. It was a bright sunny day. The blind-folded, machete-wielding fruit ninja; the henna tattoos, leaving messages for the bride; running through a hedge maze nude, chased by men with ping pong paddles; charging at bulls through the paddocks, running for your life as they pursued you back; shocking your genitals on an electric fence; wearing an adult diaper and sprinting through town praying that as few people who knew you as possible were lining the streets; and getting prank-arrested by some too-eager-to-assist officers in the evening. I must admit, it would’ve been a fun video. One for the ages.

But we’re no longer brothers and my duty as memory-keeper has fallen out of recollection from all parties, I can imagine. All parties except for me. I’m worried that if I press play on one of these juvenile clips I’ll start crying, let alone assemble it into a collected form. It is fragments, collected on my hard-drive alone, of a day that no longer seems to exist. The day of preparation. It’s purpose is moot. Preparing for what? The fruits are long-rotted, the branches all tinder, so what use is one scattered root?

If my hard-drive were to fail – a not insignificant concern as my ancient laptop’s wheezing has grown more and more asthmatic – then it seems this event would be wiped from the face of the earth. Maybe one of your mates would remember a moment to himself one day but who would he mention it to? What purpose does the day hold other than a reminder of what is gone? What more is it for me than a duty I couldn’t fulfil? A job I couldn’t be bothered to complete until the very crust of the planet on which that memory inhabited had crumbled to dust.