in search of lost memories

does present life sacrifice the past?

There’s energy that you get when you put an incredible number of people in one place. A constant buzzing, often cacophony, often euphony, and the battle between the two for supremacy in any given moment, place. Music in the streets, cars in the streets, trains below the streets, all present among the masses of humanity: vendors and tourists, locals and transplants. The energy is infectious, and even a tired body seems to be able to go further — walking an abnormal amount and only realizing when laid down to rest, outgoing and extroverted regardless of prior tendencies.

Of course, I’m talking about New York. I’ve been here for a few days now, part of a month-long stay to see if the city could be for me. I’ve moved in with three strangers as part of a sublet in a neighborhood that I saw once and liked a lot. I’ve made it my goal to try and understand what life here (not just a vacation) could look like.

I don’t know anyone super well here, but there are people I’ve met in every stage of my life here. I’ve already seen friends from college, I plan to see friends from high school, I plan to see people I’ve never met in real life. There are so many more people and there’s so much to do. I can see so much possibility; any given second could be a new life-changing experience when it’s just a few steps and a subway ride or a bus ride away, when everyone seems more likely to say yes to any given invitation than back home in San Francisco.

I wonder how I can even get a sense of what it is to live in a place so different from what I know. Do people who live here for longer feel the same urgent pull to go out and see what there is to offer? There are a dozen movie theaters showing films I’ve never heard of, there are virtuosos in art forms I can barely name, there are a million types of pizza slices, let alone other forms of incredible food, and the time ticks away ceaselessly, and my wallet continues to get lighter and lighter. Four days have felt like a week, a month — I can’t remember when I met the people I just met; didn’t dinner at the night market feel like an eternity together? I’ve experienced more in this short time than I did in many months, maybe years of my life. 

What is one to do with all of this novelty? Can my brain even process all of this information? Will this time period of my life grow to fill a greater part of my memory than anything else? That’s what they say, that our brain makes the time seem longer when it has to process all the novelty; it needs to keep the memories around since they offer new information that could keep us alive. And that seems completely reasonable, until you remember that our brains are not infinite. 

So with each of these memories, what do we lose? Which memories can remain legible and which ones turn to dust?

At some point in life, as we age, it seems like the norm begins to look like making fewer new memories and looking back at the old ones instead, even when the good old days didn’t seem that good at the time. But this is your brain at work too — each time we access a memory, we rewrite it a little bit. Part of it is that every memory is processed in the present, colored slightly by what we’re feeling and seeing, capable of being reshaped. My memories of events often resemble the pictures I took more and more, until the actual experience is just represented by what was in frame and everything else could be misremembered, forgotten. Maybe the color of my first bicycle was actually navy blue, rather than royal blue, maybe this time I’ll remember the weather being a little sunnier than it was. Who could even remember what it was really like? More importantly, the feelings change too — a neutral memory can grow warmer as negative details fall away, a happy memory’s beauty can decrescendo into a lack of feeling at all. The strong feelings of love you may have had for someone in the past may become completely unfamiliar.

Recall Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s elegy for his late friend In Memoriam A.H.H., with the now-familiar lines “I hold it true, whate'er befall; / I feel it when I sorrow most; / 'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.” It has grown into a common adage, one that rings true after long periods of processing of any lost love, but stings when the wound is fresh. But what happens after? Once we live enough life to recognize the beauty of loving and losing, don’t we lose again? As time drifts into the dark, our memories soften, and the once-clear shapes of our lost love begin to blur. The feelings are forgotten, eventually more theoretical than anything else. “I loved them” becomes a fact that we know more from repetition than personal experience, like the shape of the earth, like the size of the stars.

In a paragraph from Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill, the narrator recounts her attempts to cling onto a lost love:

Remember this sign, remember this tree, this broken-down street. Remember it is possible to feel this way. There were twenty days on the calendar, then fifteen, then ten, then the day I packed my car and left. I drove the length of two states, sobbing, heat like a hand against my chest. But I didn’t. I didn’t remember it.

Even as the narrator tried to hold onto these feelings, it was useless. Our memories are too weak for even the most powerful emotions. What can we even do? Everything disappears and fades and all we can do is make unfaithful records — crude pictures that can’t ever recreate the feeling of a moment. We can never maintain the moment; all fade away, the feelings disappear. So what, do we just keep trying to experience more and more, fill the hole with more memories, knowing that they will face the same fate? Yes? No? I don’t know?

How sad everything is! I despair, as I form beautiful memories of eating ice cream in the park, having conversations in a stopped subway car. I imagine photos of my past dissolving and wonder if there’s anything I can do. And I think about my friend Cara, someone who texted me about the same idea recently as well. One of my favorite tendencies of hers is how she tells me about some place that she is at (like a bridge in Central London or Hampstead Heath) and recalls memories of moments she spent there with friends or family or past lovers. She always follows these memories up with the phrase, “city as palimpsest.”

The first time, I had to look it up. A palimpsest is a piece of writing material where the original writing has been removed to make room for new writing, with traces remaining of what was written before. And a palimpsest feels like an answer. I liked this idea a lot, and began to share memories in the same way — today I went to the Trader Joe’s where I’d get lunch at my first job, yesterday I went the first burrito place I ever ate at in San Francisco seven years ago, I’m at the jazz club that she introduced me to. Retelling these memories had me look at each of my experiences more closely, wondering what else was shared with each new experience I had. If the city could be a palimpsest, with memories encoded in different locations, couldn’t our minds be similar, holding residual pieces of everything we’d ever seen, heard, thought, felt?

I’m picturing my memory like a palimpsest: a worn leather-bound codex, one whose pages slowly fade as more and more is written. But the writing isn’t linear, and even though it’s a complete volume I have more to add — as I scribble on a now-blank page, some faint muscle memory guides my fingers, makes me feel warm towards places and people for reasons and memories I no longer know. Every action is a new mark on the page and everything is constantly fading, but we don’t forget into clean slates; it’s more like erased pencil marks. Somewhere deep down, there are traces, remnants of feeling, even when I don’t recognize them. There’s always something within us that remembers.

I don’t remember how my first love felt. I don’t remember the first time I tried ice cream. I don’t remember the first time I found a song I loved or the first time a movie made me cry or the first words I wrote that felt like something significant. But each day, as I break out of my morning slumber to face another day, it’s there. Every time a stranger feels familiar, or I hit it off with someone, I imagine faded memories of people I once knew that make me feel closer to someone I barely know. Every time I surprise myself with something that I know, or something I am not afraid of, maybe it’s a memory metabolized into my being.

I return to the present, ready to make more memories until I can no longer; knowing they’re safe, in one form or another.

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💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• PLAYLIST - spoken word house - house music with way too many words

• ESSAY - “Can Forgetting Help You Remember” by James Groopman - a partial inspiration for this piece!

• POEM - “Regained Loyalty” by Saadi Youssef, translated by Khaled Mattawa - feels related