They say that memory is not reliable; but it is all we have to tell the story of our life, to remind us of who we are.
Whenever the Carpenters’ Yesterday Once More comes on, I come back to my 8-year-old self at my friend’s house, listening over a cassette tape. The Beatles’ And I Love Her recalls my 14-year-old self playing it on my own cassette tape, over and over, trying to extract the lyrics onto a piece of paper. Mariah Carey’s Underneath the Stars brings back my 15-year-old self in a hotel room, waiting for immigration paperwork into the U.S. The years aren’t so precise, but the images are vivid, returning without fail at the beck of these old tunes.
Sometimes I get a short story, like the 3-hour bus ride with my mom to visit my grandparents in summertime. My grandfather got a fish out of their pond to bury it under a mound of rice straws. Then he lit the straws and they’d crackle while smoke came billowing atop. My cousin picked lotus fruits from a nearby lake. There was still no electricity, so we sat on the porch and chattered over the lotus seeds, underneath the pitch-black night sky where the stars revealed themselves in myriad shapes of animals and things.
My head is a house of ten thousand frames, each frame an instance of memory. At the call of a melody, a scent, they sneak up to catch me by surprise. The further back in time, the closer they gather like a deck of card. Their order blurs and flattens. Yet each frame is also a door. If I could unlock a door, other doors may open to arrange for me a story. If I could keep track of my stories, I could make sense of my life.
Memory is all we have. The future does not yet come, and the present is elusive. By the time our brain makes sense of an event, it already belongs in the past. When mine is not overwhelmed by the sights and sounds of the present, it tags frames and files them away, so that at an auspicious moment, they may come back to haunt me, open doors, and make stories. Some stories didn’t get written until I grew older and wiser, while some others got a re-write. Some twisted and turned into heartbreaks, while others got a surprise happy ending. Even in the past, the narrative of life is not constant, but ever changing.
My head is a house of mysteries. If I am ever patient, I could go on a quest, look for frames to open new doors and rewrite my life. But one only has so much time to stare into the abyss. Only so much truth and clarity can be gained from rewriting a life. The present is to be lived.
Ask me today and I shall tell you my truth.
Ask me tomorrow and I shall tell you my other truth.
But I am never lying.
hardlyplaying.blog 