Smile On His Lips and Cuts On His Hips (Jalex)

Thirty Seven - Oh Memories

Some people experienced everything through their cameras, and I’d never gotten that at all. I believed that instances worth recording were best saved mentally, important images fixing themselves in my mind, recalled in instants of despondency and reminiscence.

The problem with memory, though, is that it does decline. It obscures with passing seconds, gets distorted, confused, is unreliable. 

Pictures, however, static color images with distinct lines, are changeless and can be seen again as often as someone desires; they secure the exact aesthetics of a moment.

But the emotions, the movement of the air, how sounds pushed or pounded on the ear drums, another person’s bones or splashing rain against one’s skin can’t be captured in emotionless pictures. So photographs, while meaningful and incredible, were also inadequate.

It was because of that that I liked to focus all my senses on current moments and trust that my consciousness would save it if anything worth remembering happened. Missing out on certain parts of experiences to take photos of them didn’t seem justified to me. Some probably crappy pictures for all my non-optical senses wasn’t quite an even exchange.

So I rarely pulled out my phone during concerts, fixating on the beat drum thrumming against my ribs rather than adding another glowing screen to the crowd. It was better to have a genuine memory of my favorite songs being played live - all the constant amazement that I experienced when great band members recreated exactly what I’d listened to so many times while driving, cleaning, living – than a video of it to smile at later. There was YouTube for that. I didn’t have to record my life with vibrating hands and a falsifying lens.

And there wasn’t even much that was worth recalling. Being a person was fucking hard and was often undesirable. I get up, immediately wish that it was the end of the day and I was going to sleep again, go to school, learn boring information that I’d soon forget in all the classes I passed through, go home, endure homework while texting so that I didn’t get overpowered by the pointlessness of everything, have diner, drink water, shower, sleep, do everything compulsory to function properly as a human being besides anything that made me happy. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Infinite, irritating. Fucking life.

Of course, though, those mindless times that bled together were infused with the countdowns on my phone reaching zero, concerts and surprisingly great movies and gulping laughter on vibrant days. And those, those where what I was reluctant to forget.

Because I didn’t take pictures of Tom Delonge singing Reckless Abandon when I saw Blink live, so maybe eventually I’d forget how the lyrics rubbed against my abused throat when I shouted them back at Blink, how the neon lights had flashed insanely during the chorus, the push of bodies against my back as everyone collectively surged closer to the stage, the band, the source of the guitar riffs and drum beats and essential vocals and music that we lived off of. The idea that that memory might somebody be erased or condensed to clear space for what my I eventually regarded as more essential was alarming.

I could be forty-five and commuting to the cubicle job that I’d likely end up with and hear Sugar We’re Going Down on the radio, a song that practically everyone could sing along to, and fail to do exactly that. Those ‘what ifs’, those possibilities of what actually truly mattered falling from my brain pained me.

I disagreed with the notion that forgetting something invalidated having ever done it, but I hated that thought, that my teenage years might seem exclusively crappy when I recalled them in the future, all the fantastic times that justified everything else getting covered by the amounts of monotony in my memory. Fuck, that was disturbing.

My walls were papered with reminders of what I loved and ecstatic hours to force me to realize that Earth was a fucking amazing place and I’d gotten lots worth living for from it, and maybe the concert tickets, posters, funny tags, pictures of crowds I’d  been in, and calendars with days ticked off were enough. Maybe seeing those repeatedly would permanently ink the events they were linked to into my brain; maybe forgetting wasn’t something to panic about.