John Christopher Nelson
We can’t avoid romanticizing our memories. The then we create is favorable to the now we endure. We aren’t afforded the opportunity to tint the present, so we rely on our ability to color the past to our liking. It’s one of our genetic adaptations, compensating for our lack of hide and lack of horns.
I’ve heard people say we need to be careful with our memories, as with VHS tapes: each play wears away at the quality of the image, distorting the shapes and their shades, until the ribbon has become so raw, the tape-player eats it, impatient with our hesitance to purchase a new copy. The idea is that it’s possible to review the same moment to the point of erasure.
I say the reality of memory stands in opposition to this understanding of it. The nature of nostalgia is wound up in embellishment. Each time we recall a memory, we add another coat, like an indolent landlord prepping for a new tenant, until the memory becomes a grotesque: bulging and jutting in ways unnatural and surreal. To possess memory is to invent, to direct the moment until the details fulfill the emotional deficit that justified its initial retention.
I imagine, and have experienced, memory functioning the way we use a file cabinet. As time continues to whisper around us, each memory’s folder is given a home within the cabinet. But as the folders continue to accumulate, the drawers become crowded and less care is given to organization. Eventually, certain files are misplaced and become difficult to find, if not altogether impossible to unearth. But, they’re never destroyed. They’re always in there someplace, maybe accidentally bent and smothered away in the back of the drawer, under the dog pile of fresh folders.
When we try to remember something that isn’t immediately accessible to our recall, we have opened our drawers and, while our conscious, present mind engages with the real-time tasks at hand, the amorphous shadow at the back of our brain remains diligent, digging through the folders. That Ah-ha moment of clarity—when the memory, the right word, the name of the actor (Rip Torn), that song we used to love and listen to exhaustion, but now can’t remember the title or artist responsible (“The Green Green Grass,” by The American Analog Set)—happens, when the subconscious mind retrieves the correct folder and interrupts our present obligations to remind us of what we feared missing. And, sometimes, pleasant or maudlin in turn, the subconscious mind stumbles across related files during its search. Those are returned to us also. When we hold those lost folders, do we not try to match up what little of the memory we’ve retained with what is actually documented, like aligning transparent slides atop each other and noting the disparities, marveling at the patina of time?
Is it not tempting to take a red pen in hand, and make harmless little edits? As a writer who struggles with the sometimes too blurred line between creating fiction and documenting nonfiction, I often find myself not necessarily taking liberties with my edits, but fine-tuning their aesthetics. Zoom. Rotate. Enhance. Shift the focus from the person you’re talking to and look instead at the liminal details. The framed painting on the wall behind them. What does the image capture and did it matter in that precise moment? Why was that detail included in this file’s photograph? As with a poem, every word counts in an image.
Certainly, the same moment from different points of view can differ drastically in its bloom. I find that the emotions with which I skew scenes from my life come into conflict with the way others who were present understood that same moment. The filing system functions as efficiently as it can manage, but among the beauties of our too short humanness, is our tendency to gawky imperfection.
Some memories remain lost for so long, or perhaps misplaced in such a way, that when we rediscover them, it’s nearly impossible to believe they truly belong to us. We know it’s ours, but fail to recognize it as a familiar.
Nostalgia—whether the thing in itself or the action of feeling it—makes life the bizarre, punch-drunk fever dream that it is. If we recalled things exactly as they were, we might become bored with ourselves. The human ego needs the ability to edit memories, even as they are being replayed. The younger we were at the time the memory was recorded, the more precise our editing of it. Even if it is enacted subconsciously, this is a deliberate act of preservation: the more hues used to advantage the moment, the more difficult it will be to forget. When we’re younger, our emotions feel less muted and experiences reach further within. It makes sense that these memories would be worth holding on to, as a means of defending against the eventual banalities of adulthood.
Think back to the first time you journeyed into the night, up and down the crests and slopes of Mar Vista, to visit the young woman you’d just starting dating. She still lived at home with a mother you’d yet to meet—a faceless mother, unaware of your presence in her house. When she opens the back door, she tells you, Try to be quiet, my mom’s already asleep, holding it half-closed against your entrance to ensure that you understand the importance of the instructions she’s giving. For a moment, you wonder how many other boys she’s conducted this way and hope that you’re the first, even if you know that you’re not.
There’s this roaring of knots in your stomach, the opposite of what you feel when you’re caught in a lie. This place is full of foreign familiarity, something you invented on the spot so none of your fingers can pin it down. It feels like crushing on the older sister from The Wonder Years, who you grew up watching on TV, and your guts are flooded with what men weathered free of whimsy call piss and vinegar. At that moment, her home is unlike any house ever built any place in the world. Every detail is immeasurably interesting, in a way that it isn’t really, or at least eventually will no longer be. Who is this person and how are you parked on her street, about to set foot inside of the home where she was raised? You feel defeated when you realize this can’t be your life, that in the morning you’ll wake without having ever really been here. But you are here. And, later, in your memories and dreams, you’ll sometimes be here again, often without intending to revisit.
You wish she’d use the bathroom as often as you’ve had to so you can have more time to take note of all of the things she’s nailed to her walls—these clues to who she is. You hope for just one more second, or a few sets of them, to sneak a look at everything she’s tacked to the bulletin board above the sofa in her room. There are Post-it notes with inside jokes you’ll never ask about but always want to know, photos of memories that aren’t yours with people you’ve never met, and cartoons from The New Yorker with her own captions written in. All of this sums up to a secret never whispered in your ear.
She has a sofa in her room.
Everything is just so, but you have the sense that, had you not been coming over tonight, this wouldn’t be the case. There is an irregular uniformity to the way things are organized, the precision of the stacks of paper on her desk and a lack of any disorder that is disharmonious with everything else about how she behaves. You watch as she awkwardly wades through the confined movements allowed by the limited space her bedroom affords, showing you this and that bric-a-brac, the way we do the first time we invite over a guest of whom we are fond.
Look at, observe, admire this evidence of my individuality.
The sofa is labeled with autumnal flowers on an off-yellow background that must have looked antiquated even when it was new. When it was new, that quality wouldn’t have provided it with the kitsch it has today, and it reminds you of a time before you were born.
Eventually, you meet her mother and her sister and they think this is your first time in their house. Soon, you’re there daily, or at least on the days when she’s not at your place, and the namelessness is lost. Sneaking in at night is reversed by achieving a first name basis with her family. You begin to realize that magic only exists at night or, at best, it’s a shoddy representation during the day. It’s the moon that shows up early or stays late, muted and pathetic against a too-bright sky with which it’s unfamiliar.
Nothing can recreate taking in as much as your eyes could devour that first time she hurriedly but silently dragged you from the back door to her bedroom. There was hardly enough time to absorb even half of the objects that occupied the service porch, the kitchen, the living room, before she deftly palmed her bedroom door closed, holding the cylinder inert by its knob.
The moments pass and we sometimes feel sadness over their distinct form of brevity. There’s that longing—one of those sensations that everyone’s felt but that’s seldom discussed, because we forget the word for it—for all that’s behind us, everything we’ve experienced once, but may never come across again. Nostalgia is a coping mechanism, a means of coming to terms with an inability to fully enjoy the moments enough to satisfy that part of ourselves that remains somehow indefinitely unfulfilled. We forget that because the moments pass, it doesn’t mean that the moments never were.
We take it for granted that we ought to pay more attention to life as it happens. It is always just after the moment has already collapsed, when the camera fades out, that we realize we weren’t watching carefully enough as the scene was unfolding.
With each day, the world is becoming a place that finds us needing more and more stimulation in order to feel anything poignant enough to truly appreciate. Too many of us want something more extravagant than the everyday, and the ephemera escape us. But if we look around carefully, every moment displays something awesome—in the actual, definitive sense of the word. Wrapped up in each day are sensations that will ensure that neither summer nor winter will ever feel the same as they once felt.
November will always recall the synesthetic experience of apricity. Weekdays, around 3:30, forewarn the afternoon doldrums and the sloping sun from a part of your life when someone you were dating photographed your silhouette, backgrounded by the telephone wires beyond your rooftop, when you really started digging into the ease of drinking carelessly and not for having fun, when that same time of day triggered that churning thirst. When you watch the travel montage in the first act of Kindergarten Cop, you will never not relive each of the eight weekends you’ve spent in Astoria, and all of the good and bad that came in tow. Listening to The Cars doesn’t forever remind you of what was supposed to be a farewell show for The Get Up Kids at the Glass House, or seeing the One Man Star Wars Trilogy at Spreckels Theatre? Oh. Well, I guess you had to be there. If you had, you’d also be thinking about True Romance.
As far as the sadness attached to some of it: some sadness is worth experiencing for the sake of itself. Also, don’t give me all that guff about misuse of the second-person. What I mean is the royal you. Anyway, we’re just having a conversation here. Relax.
Nostalgia retains that quality it has—that feeling when you asked your uncle to push you higher on a swing, without realizing that he’d do it because he was your uncle and not your father, and suddenly feeling way too much of a foreign sensation—because the moments nostalgia recalls and interprets are blissfully finite, thin as cuticles: sprinkler rainbows; flight paths of paper airplanes; sunspots in camera lenses; dandelions wished clean.
The wishes never told, that never come true either way.