Lost nights
The thing is, I have a fragmented memory. All the moments of which you're meant to have vivid recollections? I only know that they happened, and sometimes barely that. They say you'll never forget your first [insert supposedly meaningful event here], but I have, and only occasionally because I was highly intoxicated. When I first realised this I panicked, thinking I had not documented my life well enough, but I soon began to wonder if it was really such a loss. In the end I settled upon the conclusion that these moments were simply not remarkable. Just because something is the first, doesn't mean it is the only, or the most important, and absolutely not the last. Why remember your first love when there are surely greater ones to come?
Still, something bothers me. I may not recall my first kiss, but I know which socks I was wearing. I can't remember anything of my younger sister's birth, yet the pattern of the pale yellow cardigan I'd button for her in the mornings is imprinted on my mind. These details, trivialities, aren't momentous at all, and they are all I am left with.
Perhaps it is best to accept that I have a weak memory, and leave it at that. I cannot help asking, though, why all that remains clear of the most significant occasions of my life (so far) are the leftovers. Is it because I didn't dream of them, and so they didn't fall flat of my expectations? More likely, I think, I remember these incoherent snippets of my life because they were real, tangible. I suppose it's like how the memory of pain is never as bad as the pain itself. And the day of that child's birth - I know I was happy, but I can't take myself back, and feel it again.
Somehow these shallow, irrelevant details were all I could salvage from the swamp of lost emotions that is life.
Still, something bothers me. I may not recall my first kiss, but I know which socks I was wearing. I can't remember anything of my younger sister's birth, yet the pattern of the pale yellow cardigan I'd button for her in the mornings is imprinted on my mind. These details, trivialities, aren't momentous at all, and they are all I am left with.
Perhaps it is best to accept that I have a weak memory, and leave it at that. I cannot help asking, though, why all that remains clear of the most significant occasions of my life (so far) are the leftovers. Is it because I didn't dream of them, and so they didn't fall flat of my expectations? More likely, I think, I remember these incoherent snippets of my life because they were real, tangible. I suppose it's like how the memory of pain is never as bad as the pain itself. And the day of that child's birth - I know I was happy, but I can't take myself back, and feel it again.
Somehow these shallow, irrelevant details were all I could salvage from the swamp of lost emotions that is life.