Elegant Memories
As funny and stupid as it may sound in the vast life of a person, only a few things have a great impact on us. We all endure years of experience aboard this planet meet thousands of people and visit millions of places but we always seem to have a soft corner for one person, one place, and one situation.
It varies from person to person, but there are some few experiences in which we all share a common possessiveness. Be it the street side park we all grew up in, where a small child so dearly holds onto something that was once yours. Two steel braided ponytails holding on its ends a wooden plate which you so courageously took to the skies. Similarly let it rain and all the feelings in your heart wants to pour itself out.
But chief among all this is, is a feeling that is so unique and moving, so dear and dreaded… it is a person. Apart from the usual family and friends who are there for us in our day to day life. We wold have at some point met someone who in their own way knowingly or unknowingly changed something about you forever. Just as it happens in the movie Citizen Kane, it can be a girl you once met on a ferry… or in more practical terms it can be a person you met on a bus. You needn’t have spoken a word but the auroric glimpse from that person which when you catch sight off, build stories higher than any castles ever built in the sky. You would have imagined a perception for that person and moulded yourself day after day. The way you dress, the way you talk, the shoes you wear or the phone you use. And still you needn’t have spoken a word. At the end of all this what do you do when that person disappears from your life. It’s actually quite easy you would have moved on… similar to the slide in the park. But we all have a glimpse of those wonderful days from time to time, those memories that have been left untouched. You could write about it, hope to forget it but that memory stays vivid, sharp and ever emerging.
We all feel it, the moment we pass a park we imagine ourselves standing in our own street park. A memory unlike all other things is
fresh even after a 100 years. Now what do we do when these things, these things that had such a great impact in our lives, re-emerge in our real lives, what do we do when reality merges again with history.
When that moment comes, a chill runs through our spine… am I allowed to still use that swing. Will the gate keeper allow me like old days to climb the tree? Is our perception of that person still valid?
What do we do at that point, when time vanishes and hope is all but a distant rhyme, do we let ourselves indulge in the fairy-tale… do we go for one more round aboard this memory lane. When all we have is the memories of a boy long since lost, of a place never to be visited and a time so memorable it doesn’t deserve to exist now.
So tell me now what do I do when a memory blips on the corner of my Facebook page… a simple elegant name, followed by 59 mutual friends… with a dark purple box that says “CONFIRM FRIEND”
Originally published on Paradise Lost.