I have no talents, no gifts, no outlandishly über human qualities to speak of. A mediocre writer, sketcher, thinker; I am an average human so to speak. But I must admit there is one thing I am absolutely good at - missing things. I am a consummate misser; a rememberer of things past, of time gone by, of time immemorial. I am a staunch supporter of the nostalgic, a devotee of reminscence, an enthusiast for the wistful. May I repeat that and say it in three different ways? Indeed, memories are my passion.
Yes, the past. It looms large in my very little brain. I spend hours, days upon days conjuring up the remember-whens, and the good-old-days. I will remember songs from my youth and gently hum them under my breath for fear of being heard, or for being thought as a crazed woman. I will recall images of what I would see on a daily basis outside of my bedroom window while growing up and older. I will re-live moments of happiness, of joy and sheer dismal pain over and over again, just to remember, just to remind me so that I won't forget.
Some days, recollections are harder to come by. Other days, my brain just overflows, as if there was some breach in section 21 of my brain and for some reason the memories just bound over the floodgates. There are triggers - a scent, a scene, a saying - these tip off the electronic fields holding in my memories and send them flying over the gates. I am instantly transported, to that day, to that time, like a fuzzy, echoing scene of a movie flashback. There I am standing in the cold, crisp air without a sweater, freezing my butt off, waiting for the morning bell to ring before going to class. There I am in my art apron painting what will be my maraca made out of a light bulb a deep dark violet. There I am eating bread pudding after the roast beef and potato lunch. There I am with a scraped and bloody knee the size of an old silver dollar after running to the pool because I couldn't wait to go swimming.
Randomly, scatologically splaying out from neurons sending out electrical pulses from section 21 to section 30 of present thought. Like droppings, invading every part of the brain, sometimes left out to dry before they can be reeled in, in their fresh, steaming glory. The that-was-then and this-is-now's of my life are on constant play-back. There is more to rewind and review each time. It builds upon itself, and soon this very moment that I am writing this will be part of the tape back-up storage in section 21 of my brain. I can access the main server and do a search and pull up memory #1,523,890 and remember this day as I'm writing this piece. I'll remember that I'm currently writing about my passion, my fondness for memory storage, back-up RAM and how, above all things that I can't do, I'm quite a good nostalgist.
2:14 PM | |
