Once upon a time, I used to form memories pretty well. At least, I remember the feeling of being able to recall lots of events in vivid detail, even if I can’t remember the, well, the remembering itself. In the last 10 years or so1 that’s gone kind of awry, for whatever reason; I still have a pretty good mind for facts and details, if I can learn them in the first place, but recollection of experiences is more of a struggle.
The moments I do remember tend to be more about the people than the situation, which I think is true for most people - it came free with your being a social species - but it leads to an interesting effect. Rationally, it makes sense to me that the future is influenced by small actions we are all making constantly, and the future of relationships with the people around us are part of that; emotionally, I look back and the past few years look like a string of connected moments that defined the course of my existence and how I relate to others. And looking back, somehow, most of them seem to have been individual nights.
Some people would credit this to the existence of alcohol, right? Being intoxicated lowers social boundaries, this makes it easier to break through into forming a deeper relationship with someone, that’s the end of it. And I think in some cases that’s true for me, but it doesn’t cover the whole picture. I wasn’t drinking the night of my last performance with my high school music class, when we sat around talking shit for an hour and I felt for the first time like these people were actually my friends - I wasn’t drinking when I was playing Minecraft with friends overseas at 3 in the morning, hoping my parents wouldn’t wake up and hear my PC running - I wasn’t drinking when I went out with some of my Uni friends wearing a dress for the first time (though they were, from memory), or when I lay on the grass by the river with some of my closest friends and realised I was falling desperately in love with them.
This is not to discount the ones where it was a factor, of course, but it feels like there’s some deeper common point, like somehow building those moments that alter the course of personal history just gets fundamentally easier once the sun goes down. My current theory is that it’s some combination of Specific Circumstances (if you’re out at midnight you probably have a reason), perceived and actual escape from the concerns of daytime, and just plain slightly delirious tiredness on occasion. Helping this theory is the fact that most of the non-nighttime moments in the timeline of my memory have one or more of these points in common in their own ways.
Maybe it’s bad of me to think about my life this way; at the very least, I worry that getting too far into romanticising this Great Man Theory view of my own life will lead me to deemphasise the countless day to day decisions that realistically make so much more of a difference than any individual day can. But at the same time, sometimes I get to hang out with my friends, singing along to Bastille2 in the car (listening to others sing better than I do, mostly), sitting under a bridge talking about crazy candy ads or an imaginary guy called Gareth, lying on the grass by the river for the first time in a while, and I get to feel the memories I will get to keep forming in real time.
“hmmm, when did this start? I think I remember feeling kind of distressed about it in my first year or so of Uni, that would have been- oh fuck me i’m so old-” ↩
This is, I think, where I need to admit that while this collection of thoughts was coalescing in my head earlier this evening, I was only about 30% of the way to actually wanting to write a post about it - and then the thought for this title came to me and i went “tee hee hee that’s a good one” and then, well, here we are, and I find myself politely asking anyone reading to not think about the rest of the song referenced here. ↩
