City’s buzzing and hustle and bustle die away. Warm photo filter on.
Each time a lonely fast car races past the window deep in the night, I wonder what´s the driver’s story. If he’s going back from a party or hurries to someone, or just likes night and speed. I will never know. The memory of the car racing by fades away.
Even that vivid memory does. A full 3-d picture with its words, looks and smells gradually turns into a sketchy drawing. A sketch preserving just most essential lines and points are much easier to zip. The memory is stored away and then pushed back by the new fresh ones to ever farther corners of one’s (sub)conscious.
And then you pass that very building, those very windows and – flash! – here they are. Nice trick, show me some more... All right, she was wearing a black shirt. Or was is a blue top? It was around midnight I think. Or? Was it warm? Logically, not. Logically? What did he say? I don’t.... remember.
Sketchsketchsketchsketchsketchsketchsketchsketchsketchsk
We can never RELIVE memories. The mind tries to trick us each time someone takes up this risky enterprise. It fills in the sketch on it’s own, with its colours, emotions, and voices, slipping us its own ‘reproduction’. Some details, the ones we paid attention to in that very moment turn into a kind of mental hooks which the mind resorts to when unzipping a memory.
There are just a few, lived so vividly, whose memories have so many ‘hooks’ that they dig deeply inside and you say ‘it’s like it was just yesterday’.
…“Remember we were on our way back from Sagrada Familia? You said you always wanted to take a picture here”. “Hmm”, you nod smiling at the memory creeping in and unfolding.
Flashback.
