QOTD #14: What will you remember?
What will you try to remember? What will you choose to forget?
This week’s thinking prompts: As we wind down from a year that is, in many ways, unforgettable, what will you take forward with you? What do you choose to remember from this period of your life; what would you like to forget? How are you honoring your reality today to inform what you hope the next era - next week, next month, next year, your future - will bring?
Against my defeatist self-talk, against the nail-biting timeline, against all odds, I made it.
I somehow moved my life halfway around the world in 2.5 weeks. 3 trips to governmental departments, 2 weeks of quarantine to pack, and 1 long look across the harbour on my final Star Ferry ride - for now.
The moment the plane took off, I took my first deep breath for the first time in a month, more relieved than excited or anxious. Then I passed out for 10 hours.
At one point, a friend was giving me advice on taxes, sharing that she “blacked it out because the whole process was so traumatic.”
I now know exactly what she means.
In the days since the move, as I start unwinding from the tightly curled fist of this hectic time, of endless checklists and dependencies and forms to fill out and companies to call - my memory has started to work in strange, circular ways.
I forget basic details behind logistical arrangements I only handled a few weeks ago, but distant memories I haven’t thought about for years have started to surface. That trip to Yunnan we took ages ago, how loud the rapids were, how close we were inching to the bottom of the ravines, the ground seemed to shake. The piano I first played on as a kid, how one of the keys always struck me as imperfectly beautiful. Was it E flat?
Where do these come from? And why now? In this time, when I am constantly pushing myself to journal, to note down everything, to soak up and remember to carry forward every sweet detail of this particular time period - of finally reuniting with K to begin the rest of our lives together.
It is surreal, how much our minds adapt to what was previously impossible. After nearly four years of long distance, my mind has become a master at carrying a ticking countdown in my head. I still wake up some days with the firs thought, “how many days left.”
Till the airport. Till the goodbye. Till the long way, long count back to here.
Now that there is no timeline, there seems to be more confused mental space keeping me in a temporal limbo. It is difficult to stay in the present when it’s being overwhelmed by the past.
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These memories come and go, without the typical emotional attachment to them - even as I register how profound these memories acted on my life then, and continue to be.
A dog comes up to me in the woods and the light catches in a beautiful way, and I recall the most moving gift that I ever received from a friend in high school was a Flickr Pro one-year subscription that I never touched - for when I was exploring photography. How spoiled I had been to have taken that kindness for granted. That friend now lives in Amsterdam and we haven’t seen each other in 10 years.
My mom sends me an auto-generated video from a family vacation we took in 2018, and I remembered that E and I randomly posed with a lot of the garbage cans (?!) as some kind of joke that I don’t remember anymore. I recall beautiful postcards and plates lining a sunny path down the cobbled stone staircase, and all I could think about at the time was how I didn’t want to miss a step down and roll all the way down the stairs to the bottom, like in a cartoon. But I had the distinct taste of a real danger I wasn’t ready for.
That one time my security guard from two apartments ago was flipping through an old photo album to show me the time he went to Canada as a teenager, all the scenes he and his uncle posed in front of. That time the staff stood with me outside the building when K ran by from his marathon route, cheering him on at 6am before crawling back to bed. He shared a name with one of my exes; he always held the door open for me even when he was on dinner break. I called him “leng jai” every chance I got.
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The only explanation I can think of is that I am in such a new space that the only way my mind can cope is to search, deep in the archives, for comparable experiences.
All this robust autopilot in the past month has been itself a distraction from processing one of the heartiest life transformations I’ve experienced in the last few years.
Still - sometimes the present is so powerful, I can’t help but stay here, just for a while.
Yesterday, the cup of tea waiting for me when I woke up. The hand over mine as I fell asleep on the train. The arm around my shoulder when I’m reading. And tomorrow morning, his reassuring voice bringing me back to a reality I have chosen - that I will always choose, again and again - “it’s time to get up.”
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Note to Readers
Hello, friend. A hearty welcome to new readers far & wide. (And to my former teammates and colleagues, excited to bring you to the ~frands~ phase of our relationship, haha.)
I’m feeling extra cheesy lately, not to mention thrown off by all these dream-like memories coming up now and then. I seriously can’t tell if it’s because of this reflective time of year, or maybe I’m just overdosing on the rigorous vitamin D I’ve started taking to combat this shockingly! cold! region on earth!
Hope everyone has been doing well as we enter the final weeks of 2020. I’m doing another #30DayChallenge for December, and sharing more WIP ideas & thoughts (and the world’s cutest baby Christmas Tree) on Instagram. Next few newsletters will be light on content ✨ as we go into holidays and I catch up on my very-behind-Goodreads goal. Would anyone like to do a book roundup chat with me on their 2020 reads? It’s been a strange year but a wonderful year of books.
Until next time, be well, sending you big hugs, Kerri
Photo by Christopher Ott on Unsplash
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Currents is a biweekly newsletter with prompts and essays for exploring joy and contemplation to live a more meaningful life. Subscribe to get these in your inbox, so you can forward to your favorite people, and leave a comment to let me know what’s on your mind.