(Un)memory

One of the things about having an appallingly bad memory is that you are constantly ambushed by your past selves.

Sometimes it takes you by surprise, as they jump out at you from behind some innocuous-looking object. Sometimes you know you’ve brought it upon yourself by wandering down memory alley after dark.

What with one thing and another – joining facebook, trying to introduce some order to my memento-stuffed bedroom at home, looking through old photos – this has been happening rather a lot.

My child selves mostly induce in me a tender pity; they do not feel quite like myselves. But, I salt away the odd things I treasured then.

My adolescent selves make me wince. I am mostly quite glad to forget.

With my most recent selves, well, the relationship is more complex. I feel regret that I did not spend my student days better, that I wasn’t happier and bolder and more alive and less afraid, that I didn’t do more things. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that I hold that regret for each day I’ve ever passed.

So these selves make me sad. But there is happiness too, and fondness. There is a smile on my lips as I remember the day when we did that. And a longing for those days that will never come again (and oh they never do).

And oh I wish I didn’t forget so easily.

It is a very peculiar thing to look at old photos. To do so is to remember that I am not simply the sum of my most recent experience, of the last couple of years or so. That I run much deeper than that, that there is more to me. It is to discover a vast, forgotten hinterland.

It is to open a forgotten door in your house somewhere (and don’t we all have one of those, that hovers on the elusive edge of unsettling dreams?) and to find a whole room that has somehow dropped out of your consciousness, though now you find it you know you’ve always known it was there. The furniture, the pictures, the way the mirrors reflect the lampshades, the view from the window – they are all perfectly familiar. And yet they are another country.

More than that it is to open a door – and now you see it you know it’s always been there – and to find a whole house on the other side, and to realise that you’ve been living in one room all along. And to know that next time you wake you’ll have forgotten again.

Oddly enough, it is the photographs I took of my room in college that first affect me most. I look at my posters and pictures and plants and books in that year’s particular arrangement and remember the person who lived in that habitat. I firmly believe that we live in our surroundings, not just in the obvious way, but that we bleed into the shape of our forks and the colour of our favourite throw and the way the light slants across the wall.

And so I look at the photographs and I remember the things I did and the things I knew and the things I thought about, and how I felt about things, and what I hoped and dreamed and wanted. I remember that I was quite different, perhaps better.

And then I look at the photographs of my friends, and I remember forgotten punting trips, parties, days out… balls even. Some of them are still close friends, some I know are slipping away, some are no more than a name I used to know. I remember camaraderie, silliness, brilliant conversation, shared emotions, shared time. And I miss them.

And although it’s a destructive emotion that I try not to have, I regret what is lost. And I wonder who I am, and who I want to be.