images

In boredom of not being able to sleep, I got the strange urge to look at pictures from prom my sophomore year of high school. As I've become so accustomed, I opened iPhoto and looked for the tab like it was any other occasion before I realized that while it might seem like a recent memory, that was six years ago, and pictures from that long ago were definitely not easily accessible. It's almost as if that whole night didn't even happen anymore, the dress I wore is hazy in my mind, I remember only a few people who seemed to stick out, and next to nothing is remarkable.

And then I got to thinking about it, about our reliance today with some sort of tangible evidence to be able to associate something with a memory. About how even though I was too young to really take anything out of it, I remember my grandma and grandpa taking me to the park one winter night and dragging me around in a box or a wagon, or something and wrapped me in a plaid wool blanket. Any time that I see any sort of red plaid, I can immediately hear my grandpa laughing and feel the snowflakes on my skin, and the sweaty coolness of being a little kid playing outside in the wintertime. A few notes from a song can take me back to Spring Valley Way before I even knew what a college campus looked like, and hadn't even had braces or been to high school.

So maybe an image on a screen isn't quite necessary to remember a moment, a time or a place. Sometime's all that's necessary is the wind to blow a certain way and that's all I need to take me back to the hills of Athens on a hot summer day, or to the first time I was out past midnight. To the first time I ever got broken up with, or to the sweet smell of chlorine on a summer morning, or sitting at The Spot with the people who made my world go round at the time, some that still matter and others that don't.

Time has come to pass since all of the things I no longer have some sort of tangible image of, in some cases a lot, and in others not as much. One thing that has always served me well is my memory. The second happens to be my laptop's hard drive. Don't fail me now.