Each individual has golden and sour memories. Golden because they reserve a faintly lit fireplace in one’s heart; sour because the warmth felt is only a recollection. The moments that are a source of joyous recollections when the ship of life sails smoothly, but become a sink of melancholic nostalgia when the waves crest too high. The moments that, in many decades, while lying in bed, on the verge of falling asleep, they will both leave a few but noticeable drops and the faint trace of a smile upon an otherwise peaceful face.
But even amongst memories, there are moments that burned brighter. These are when you realize that the moment will remain in your memory. Some sweet memories may be the innocuous, simply traversing through the mundane of life with someone, that one doesn’t treasure immediately. On the other hand, some core memories are ones you know that you will remember, because of the actual significance of the moment itself, like graduation or sky diving. For me, however, the most memorable events are the ones that are and only ever will be mundane; but despite the mundanity, they feel like so much more even as the moment is unraveling.
It’s the weirdest feeling, to realize how a recollection of a moment will feel while still partaking in that exact moment itself. Late-night walks with your best friends in high school. Cooking with your aging grandma. That last AP Lit class with people you’ll never see again. And smoking that last cigarette with you.
I never liked the fact that you smoked. “It’s bad for your lungs, they’re gonna look blacker than tar.” “It helps me with the stress, trust.” And back and forth we would go, be it during summer, the designated time for our yearly (and brief) return to our hometown or during through digital waves connecting us across continents. Every time we spoke, in addition to the insistent nagging around smoking, we traded advice on school, career, relationships and everything in between. After every time, there was always a lamentation that our discussion should have lasted just a moment longer.
There was an unspoken melancholic feeling that last trip, though. You just landed an extremely lucrative job (finance or something), and it became clear but not outright stated that our yearly reunion would become much less frequent. Ironically enough, I was the one who gave in. You lit a cigarette for yourself but also passed me one. I choked on the first inhalation. You laughed and showed me the correct way. It didn’t feel like anything at all except a light, pleasant buzz that could be real or could just be a placebo (I never got the appeal of cigarettes, to be honest). You showed me how to stomp them out, but I kind of wanted to look at flames slowly burn out. We strolled along the riverbed near both our houses. As I gazed at the night sky, with only a few bright stars shining through due to the smog, I realized that I will remember this last walk for a very long time, simply for the fact that it was with you, and I was unsure if there would be a next time.
UF PRISM 