memories

She tells everything passingly, as if they all didn’t matter to her. Every now and then, she is assailed by new faces everyday. She is now tired. They are now in an apartment just next to Broadway, and she tells W, resting on her lap, wearing that one dollar dress she got from Saturday Market  (“We’re all leaving the country! Two of us to Canada and another two to London!”, says girl, still in her young twenties), every little one of her fleeting interests.

“When I was in Form 2, I wanted to become a psychiatrist. So I studied the lot of it, the DSM-IV, those mental illnesses, everything“. She lists out all those names, then came to a slight pause. “My teacher said I was bipolar once. She was standing at the far corner of the room, near the door, and I was sitting on my bed and I said, ‘everyone has mood swings,“.

Then there was the one hour driving lesson driving the manual car, climbing small, imaginary, difficult hills. Driving in deserted streets and lanes where your attempts won’t be scorned or laughed at. The act of balancing. Variables. We wanted, A and I, to drive to Mt K-; the day seemed too beautiful not to see the city and the beach from above, but the road was closed. Falling rocks, it said.

I went up there once. It was a gloomy day, and there were three of us. I was only three weeks settled. Took us two hours halfway, but as it was raining heavily by the time, a dozen little bloodsuckers feasting in my shoes, we turned back by the main road, soaking wet and telling stories to each other. H had been travelling all over the place, from Darwin to Ayers to the Great Barrier Reef, so he told tales of seeing women dancing around the bonfire, chanting their songs, faces painted and ornaments jumping about their chests. Then we took shelter at some archery range and hung around until there was this man who was really nice and drove us back to city.

It is difficult for me to remember people’s names. I can only remember the circumstances which lead to it, the place, the conversation, the atmosphere. My memories are attached to the internal, the abstract, and not what it in itself contains. I traverse places, not to see what’s there, be it an ocean, a sunset, a monument, or a temple, I seek beauty only to feel what it evokes in me. After all, you only experience things once, you might only encounter people once, so why bother filling it all with facts details instead of one singular snapshot evocative of that feeling? Iman says, out of courtesy, you should. You may never know when you might bump into them again. She remembers everyone.

F told me one night that it’s really nice to smell, to see, to hear, a thing and suddenly be reminded of something, a memory, one that is long forgotten. A sudden nostalgia. To rediscover the past in the present. I tell him he sounds like Marcel Proust.