On memories
When I look back through periods of my life, I feel this strange sense of coherence. I was a kid, one of four boys, running around my childhood home. We played ball tag and Nintendo 64. We ate Thin Mints and I would punch my little brother when he got on my nerves. He would punch back so I would hit him harder until he knew I would always have the last one.
Then the days spent at school learning about Sherman’s March and predicate nominatives. Afternoons of homework and throwing the white ball across the green field. I never thought I would be a major league player or even really wanted to.
Then high school with its weird cliques and ideas of social status and what it meant to be cool. I didn’t drink or do drugs until my junior year when I finally drank and had that one embarrassing experience of drinking a little too much and making a fool of myself like everyone does.
Then college where I wanted to be erudite and learned. I wanted to know things about Lagrangians and the Tractatus and when to use ex ante vs. a priori. The pretentious promises of Ivory Tower snobbishness.
I left those periods behind not knowing they’d be forever gone. Many of the people too, along with all the laughter and the tears, the smiles we shared and the times I called their names and watched as their heads turned in response. Responsiveness, that maddeningly charismatic and transitory relic of the present.
Others stay in our lives. We make memories together, evolving as we hurry to shed the parts of ourselves we wish to leave behind. The exoskeletons of embarrassment. And we almost never stop because we’re going somewhere and looking back just slows us down, and time’s inexorable march never pauses so why should we?
We never think about this when we first meet someone new. That she could be in your life for a while or out of your life the next day. Or she could come in and out, criss-crossing paths as you both change in ways unknowable and unpredictable, unaware of the last smile you will exchange and the last time you will be lost in each other’s eyes forgetting to cherish that squinty glint of mutual understanding. Is it possible to feel nostalgia for the present? For a person and not a memory or an experience. Even if you think you have the ability to keep her in your life, you can never really know and you can’t even know whether you would want to. Is what you do and who you see always eventually only what and who you want to do and see?
The only thing that is forever and always is you, so you only end up becoming more yourself. That sounds like a positive thing and it most likely is. It doesn’t stop you from reaching back for the things you once had even if you didn’t appreciate them back then. The what-could-have-beens of any life thoroughly lived. The parts of you still stuck in a time you’ll never relive. The people conversing with and hugging and kissing your past self but never again to be part of the present tense you, the experiencing you. I guess we have no choice but to love memory only for what it is. Memory, in its role as the great preserver of the past, is the aftertaste of a quality wine. A lingering bittersweet reminder of things once so real and experienced for just a fleeting moment of the indomitably solipsistic present, sailing off your palate like the wake behind a ship of Theseus bound never to make a return trip over the same waters.