To remember.

Ahhh. Fresh new blog smell. Hmmm what to write, oh what to write. You must excuse my lack of cohesive thought and just roll with it, because I feel that it's just time to throw up words on a new word document for a shining new blog.

I've found myself pondering the idea of memory and memories increasingly more often lately. After AP Bio last year and only skimming the surface of memory, my naturally curious self has spent hours obsessing over the complexities of memories. Just the thought that everything is more of a memory than actual action; the present is so finite that before you can even think about it, time has already marched on the the past. So why do we remember what we remember? I can recall perfectly an evening when I walked up to a restaurant in silence while I considered the concepts of present and past for one of the first times, but I have to strain myself to remember what I even had for dinner last night. I can hardly even recollect the exact details of my first kiss, but the memory of my 6th grade crush telling me he liked someone else is still fresh in my mind. I can see the scene, I can hear his voice, see his face. I had only liked him for what, 2 months? But I can see every moment of those few minutes perfectly. My first kiss, though as important as it is supposed to be, brings only vague thoughts of time and place, but not details. I never intended to keep the memory of a 6th grade boy telling me he liked someone else locked up, and I feel nothing for it, but I remember it. When it happened, my 8th grade self wanted to swoon and tenderly remember everything of my first kiss, but now all I can think of was a ferris wheel, a band trip, and cheering friends below.

Even though most of the memories I try to keep are only fleeting, there's always been one memory (of maybe a handful) that I have forced myself to keep. Now, as a full high school career marching band member, I've been on more bus rides than I even know, going to competitions and football games, and general band things, but there was one evening we were going to a football game. The sun had set in a weird part of the fall sky that turned everything pink. The sky, the cheeks of my fellow flutes and clarinets on our bus, the freeway, the buildings. Even the light had a new quality, as if it was infused with a mist of bustling energy that made every single laugh and smile on the bus seem increasingly more genuine and beautiful. Everything really was beautiful and nothing was wrong. The windows were open and my hair flew around me and Sarah's hair flew in my face and we laughed, Michael said something in his unnaturally deep voice for the bus filled with mainly girls, Elizabeth serenely stared off into space as everyone of the people that I spent day after day with sat bathed in pink light. It was a moment of pure euphoria, a moment when truly nothing was wrong, or at least not that I can remember. I sat in that bumpy school bus seat and gazed out at the pink sky, and I thought to myself 'I cannot let myself ever forget this moment.'

My mom has told me before that before I began Kindergarten, I could remember every moment of my life up to that moment, and once school started, my brain just dumped all those precious thoughts. With school as chaotic as it is, with formulas needing to be memorized for AP physics to such critical thought in every other AP class, I fear for what my memory will continue to be. I put so much into school, and I worry that one day I will be nothing but school, no more memories, no more internal imagery, no more pink sunsets on the dreariest of days.

But then again, Mrs. Solano gives me hope. On a total whim in AP English today, we got her talking about her love story with her husband. Even though school has only been in session for around three weeks, I can already see much of her personality in myself. Not that that really matters for the topic, but she told us about how she had known her husband since she was 7, and when she was 11, she specifically remembered telling herself that she would marry him one day. 20 years and many breakups and makeups later, she did marry him. She told us that she still has memories of all of those years, while he has a mostly blank memory, scattered with the 'important things.' It touched me that she could still remember so much of such a long story in such detail, but I couldn't get over the tinge of sadness that fought me inside when she said he wouldn't remember certain things.

Maybe what I really wanted to like about the story was that in 20 years, I'll look back on now and I'll still remember all the things that are so important to me now. I don't want to look back on my high school life and see it in as much of a blur as my first little kiss. I want to think back vividly on all the wonderful and horrible emotions that bless and curse me now, I want to remember. I want to remember eating crepes and walking under winter mall lights, I want to remember the winter picnics on a dead grassy hill, the ice skating, the movie days, taking time on the couch and outside under the trees. I want to remember feeling in love and I don't want to look back on it as if it was a trivial pursuit that meant nothing in the grand scheme of things. Mostly, just because I know my future self would know my anger of condescending the feelings of present day me. But don't listen to me, I'm getting back into my radical notions of time again.