So I was on Facebook today, trying to waste time rather than face the huge pile of summer clothes and bags and GHP nick knacks taking up residence in my bedroom, which I am supposed to somehow "clean" i.e. misplace in time for my grandparents' visit tomorrow, and something struck me. Not literally, of course, but psychologically. I was looking at the profile of my neighbor, who is a freshman and pretty new to the whole Facebook thing. (Okay, random side note: I just sneezed seven times in a row. What the fuck.) And I was looking at her Wall, which she just recently updated with the addition of three new pictures: one of someone's torn jeans, another of a giant red gash on the same person's knee, and the third, a blurry picture of a hand holding the knee out of pain. In the first picture, I noticed the chair the person was sitting in: a wood kitchen chair, on which I can remember standing to reach the cabinet where my neighbor wanted me to get the pancake mix one morning. In the second, the bottom of a wood rolling chair, which I can clearly recollect sitting in, when we played her Barbie horse riding computer game. And finally, the third: in the background, the pedal of a red bike, slightly rusted with chipped paint, that her dad had bought from the flea market which used to be where the Super Target is now, that he fixed up and gave to her for Christmas at least five years ago. I don't know why, but it just hit me all at once: all the memories we'd shared together, all the days I'd spent behind her house playing in the leaves, etc, etc. For some reason, I hadn't thought about it for a long time. And the fact that all of this surfaced made me just sort of sit, pause and think... what else am I not remembering about my childhood? And what else won't I remember in another five years? What little details and memories are hiding in the back closet of my mind, in the moth ball infested cardigans and old tapered trousers? It's just weird, to think about the fact that things, people, even our perceptions of them change. Everything I'm remembering about her I remember as I did then, but it wasn't "then," it was "now." You know what I mean? It kind of makes me hopeful, on one hand, because I know when I was in it, I didn't try to remember any of the sensory things that I can now pick out from just three of her photographs. So maybe it means even though I feel like I'm walking through a dream right now, some day I'll be able to recollect the kind of imagery and details which I sometimes set aside time to ingest. But then on the other hand, it makes me sad, knowing that these things were once a large part of my days, of my life, and now they feel like an entirely different world separate from me. I don't know, it's just weird to think that there are years of my life I won't ever get back, and yet they don't even feel like I ever had them at all.
