The earliest theatrics must have happened in our heads, because our memories are just neat little stories. Some of us battle monsters, some ascend from rags to riches, some embark on heroic quests, some are on a long voyage home. Some live delightful, romantic lives, some come to tragic ends. We all began somewhere and we all end somewhere, and events become turning points in our origin story. We think ourselves the directors of our lives, our memories the director’s cut, to continue the metaphor, of the sequence of voices, textures, odours, colours of things, people and events.
But our memories are notoriously unreliable narrators. With a tiny prompt, time and place and order and details are displaced. An innocent bystander against whom we harboured ill will is cast as the antagonist. That person we liked became a visage of perfection. We select or even make up pieces to construct a story that fit with our internal narrative. Our memory is more like a post-product house, assiduously working to replace truth with CG.
And in our memories past is always present. Our lives once codified into a story becomes, as Proust called it, an ‘ageless creature’, living multiple temporalities.
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I’m actually trying to make a point against selfies. I’m in a coffee shop. The ladies near my asked to take a picture of my brunch before it became mutilated by my fork. I obliged and was amused.
I never take photos. In fact, there are exactly two pencilated copies of my face on the entirety of the damn interwebs. (There might be a few more hidden in old Facebook posts of high school classmates, but hey at they don’t appear on Google). All my childhood photos were conveniently lost in the mad scramble of my parents trying to sell our house. As far as the world is concerned, there is no photographic evidence of my childhood. I am the sole witness to its bareness, which means I am free to make up whatever adventures I wished. I have a vivid memory of visiting Hokkaido to ski and watch penguins, I could taste the cold air, feel the steam of the hot spring, and squeeze the snow beneath my toes. I’ve never been to Japan.
The point is, we engineer experiences to commit them to memory. First date, first love, first orgasm. Good food, blooming starlight, a rose stuck on a poop. The things we see and the things we do, we tuck them into the back of our minds without much organization or order. And on a gloomy day listening to the titter tatter of raindrops, on a boring train ride across the country massaged by rumbling engines, the memories may come back to us, an embellished story of all the things we loved and all that we would have wished to see.
Our mind is already the best camera. Our insanity the best Instagram filter. Capturing an experience with immortal precision somehow cheapens our stories.
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