Putting memories to use
What do you do with them?
I grew up in the same town, in the same house, for my whole childhood. And when I was eighteen, I moved away. Now I live in the same town I moved to at eighteen, and I’ve lived here for five years already.
Such a clean break from everything close to my childhood gives me crippling nostalgia for my hometown. I don’t know what to do with those memories. When I look at a map, I can still trace out the route I used to take to the mall, and point out the highway I drove to my first part-time job. When I look at pictures of our local park, I can remember the smell of the sawdust in the playground. I remember the wide parking lot of the Baptist church where I learned to drive, next to the Dollar General we used to walk to, where I’d buy jelly beans in the summer. The memories are so strong that for a moment, they replace my reality. For just a moment, they become more real than my real life.
Such a clean break feels like a second life. Like at some point, I died and was reborn into the life I have now. Every possible thing in my surroundings has changed. Maybe a human life isn’t one life but many strung together. Maybe the average human being is actually a different person for every stage of life. You’re different. I’m different. Ships of Theseus, drifting past each other.
I think of my past selves as being distinct from my current self. Sometimes I mourn the thirteen-year-old version of me. I want to show her my life now; I want to show her what I’ve accomplished. Some people would say that she is there, watching, because she is the same person as me. But it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like she’s gone and I’m the only version of myself that’s left. Carrying the memory of her.
I grieve for even the smallest transitions. I miss old jobs. I miss old houses. But I also miss phases. Times when I used to be really into some project or other. “No man steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.” I miss things that are impossible to get back. I miss when I was nine years old and taking a kids’ programming workshop, but if I took the same workshop now, it would hardly mean anything to me. I miss the church in my grandmother’s town, but if I go there again, it feels different every time I visit. I miss the amorphous, difficult-to-describe feelings that are attached to specific situations.
What do you do with memories? It’s not as if I don’t like my life now. I’m in a great place, and it’s better to have the freedoms of being an adult than to stay a child. But there’s still a sense of loss. I don’t know where it comes from, but it swells into awareness every time I think about the past. Why continually grieve for places and times that no longer exist?
The only thing that prevents me from grieving past lives is avoiding the thought of them. I’m afraid of accumulating such an unbelievable load of memories that the past is all I ever think about, and loss becomes all I ever feel. Living will produce change and change will produce transitions—I know I would be bored as hell if nothing ever changed—but once a change takes place, I miss the way things were, even if I don’t want them back. How does that ever make sense?
It’s not unpleasant, but it’s wistful. There is only grief for what was. Sometimes, all the details of the memory fade, but the feeling remains, stuck to split-second flashes of scenes I recognize but can’t fully resurrect. The side room of a church, with little sofas and soft lace curtains. The front of a gas station at night, the orange streetlights glancing off a red sign and misty orange twilight rain all around me. The bitter cold of a blue sky, a pile of melting snow revealing the dark trunks of sturdy, neat pine trees.
The only thing worse than wading through memories is not having them at all: forgetting all significance of my past. Living adrift in the present, it’s hard to have a lasting sense of... anything, really. I wrote before about the monumental feeling of sticking with the same hobby for ten years and being able to see my progress; monuments like that don’t exist if I only live in the now. But I can’t take the past in moderation. It has to completely overwhelm me every time I touch it. The significance of events in the past doesn’t seem to diminish. I still think of angry comebacks for arguments that have been finished for years. I still live in the emotional beats of situations that have long since played out. People’s most salient example is always reliving embarrassing moments, but there are all kinds of moments to relive. Hope. Amusement. Pride. Fear. The jitters of public speaking as a teenager. The delight of making a new friend.
I used to keep a journal to hold onto these moments, but I had a hard time deciding what to write about in the moment. Every memory starts out as just an ordinary moment of the day. It’s only through the lens of some length of time that it takes on significance. Something commonplace, experienced a hundred times before, can become precious if you know it’s not going to happen again. Sudden scarcity makes a memory valuable and it’s impossible to predict. I would sit down to write and give a rote laundry list of my day—”Went to the park again. Played Wii Sports with my brother. He won the archery game”—because it’s how I felt about the day’s events at the time. I don’t know if I even could write about something recent in a way that feels emotionally satisfying to re-read years down the line. I just wouldn’t know what kind of framing my future self was looking for. And if I wrote every possible thing down in a journal, well, details multiply when you look for them. At that point, I could write constantly and still miss much.
Once you look, you fall into seeing an infinite level of detail, for infinite layers of the particular thing you’re looking at. The point, I think, is to accentuate some things and cut away others so that you can make a cohesive piece out of the initial raw material. It reminds me of drawing. When I learned to draw people’s faces, I would place lines for every detail equally and then wonder why everything turned out looking so bad.
In order to capture likeness, I learned that I had to ignore a lot of details and emphasize others. I had to be very careful which feature I awarded a line to, because that’s what would pull the viewer’s focus. Instead of building up an image, it evoked the feeling of cutting away: de-emphasizing and glossing over parts of the reference image to give the whole drawing a specific look. It requires a very light touch, and everyone’s touch will be slightly different. Some people will draw heavy eyelids and lightly trace the side planes of the nose. Some people will thicken the underside of the eyebrows and suggest the eyelids with a few dashes. Others will draw dark patches for shadows on the sides of the cheek, giving a gaunt and gothic look to the face, and tweak real-life curves to be hard, straight lines instead. So too, when the writer begins a journal entry, a cutting-away must be decided upon. A hundred cuttings taken, a hundred decisions made, about what to put in and what to leave out. It’s surprising to realize journaling is an art too, all by itself. Over and above the writing ability, before you even set down words, you have to know what to focus on, what will best bring a certain memory alive. How can you guess at the rosy nostalgia of a memory when it’s just happened, when it’s still right in front of your face?
If I had to write journal entries for things now, I’d focus on the sensory details I liked. My favorite thing about coming into work now is the angular concrete environment—so alien from a house, and so interesting—and the smell of the copper. The distant lights on the ceiling on the other side of the factory, giving you the impression of a long, imposing space. The feeling of standing along a machine line, one of a set, all in factory uniforms, working together for the same purpose. Sometimes it’s hard to shape words around the initial wordless impression, which is where raw writing skills and vocabulary can help to fill the gaps.
Maybe the point of memories is to give you raw material to work with. To write with, make art with. I know that when I tried to write as a kid, I had a hard time connecting with the subjects I wrote about, because I couldn’t make it feel real enough. Now, I can hardly stop writing, because there’s so much in my mind and memories. A whole, continuous cloth of experience can be mined, trimmed, magnified arbitrarily and put together in packages to be passed onto other people. Maybe that’s what you do with a memory. That’s what makes it more than just a pretty thought.