Chris and I have a collective memory, a hive mind abuzz with 25 years of bright, blazing moments of joy and adventure and dull, flickering days of drudgery and obligation. We are growing old together and the memories are crystalizing into a highlight reel which sometimes leaves no room for the details. Or maybe, I leave Chris to remember the details, and I settle for the glow of it all.
Before Chris, there was my older sister who is my memory keeper of sorts for our shared childhood. My memory is impressionistic while Chris and Jennifer are the masters of realism, recalling throwback scenes with precision and full-throttled truth. My memories are fuzzy with light and dark, smudged with time. Most of the time, I don’t mind the haze of the past, but sometimes I crave the clarity of rewind and playback.
I wish we had more videos of the kids and more capacity for memory, a feed I could activate with a click and Jack would talk to me of dinosaurs with his warbling 5 year old voice. Emma, sprawled on a pink bean bag telling me about her stuffed animals. So much lost footage from our lives, so many days of play, of wonder, of struggle, of growing.
The travel memories are easier to access than our mundane daily life but still I rely on our shared memory when I really want to bring the past back and sit awhile in that sun, for reverie feels a bit like being awash in the light streaming through an open window. For a while, we are back on the streets of D.C. and Jack and Emma have shrunk back down to their 2005 sizes, one on either side of me. I’m holding each tiny hand only with concentration, not with any thought that soon it will be strange to hold their grown hands in mine.
Nowadays, Emma and I might link arms and stroll. Jack and I might lean on each other in a loose hug as we walk with my head now at his heart where I can hear the beat that I composed in a fit of mystery. But in this memory, he is still small, and we hold hands as naturally as we walk, and I take no notice. Chris is in front leading us down the city sidewalks, and his jeans sag and his Vans command the way, and all I want is to keep following, that feeling is infinite; it’s in my memories, my today and my tomorrow. And I do take notice of it because all of life is finding and nurturing what you love.
We might be walking all the way to the Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial or the museums, but no matter the destination, it's going to be fun; we’re going to learn something; we’re going to eat well. There will be jokes. There will be stories. There will be a shared look over the heads of the kids of look at us, look what we did, look what we made.
That day in D.C., we follow Chris to the trolley to our surprise and delight. Here the memory begins to glitch like a frozen Zoom screen or tangled filmstrip. I catch a glimpse of my relieved self sitting, resting, unworried, unguarded, my antennae tucked and no longer vibrating while the kids are contained in the trolley. The trolley is mercifully empty. The driver tells the kids they can sit up front for a better view. They move away from us. Jack goes all the way to the front behind the driver, and Emma drifts but stays in the middle between the driver and us. I remember they are happy, and they are golden in the summer heat.
Seeing the city on foot is its own adventure, but the trolley is a parents’ dream. We don’t have to find parking or navigate or wonder at all the things we are missing. We are driven past all the greatest hits, and the buildings and monuments are majestic and we are all lost in thoughts of history and of power. The kids sense the busyness of it all, the hectic pace, and the noise.
On other visits to the city, they will want to see inside these places we drive by, where all the good stuff lives, the bones and the stories. But in this memory, they are content to glimpse the imposing and august U.S. Capitol, to observe the hustle and bustle at Union Station, and to jump on and off the trolley taking in as many historical stops as they can.
In my mind, the D.C. day turns hazy; the kids are just blurs of light tracking through the city, but if I close my eyes and concentrate, I can almost feel Emma’s cheek against my wrist leaning into me, just lolling like the baby animals at the zoo with their mothers. I can see Jack looking for me even as he moves ahead of me, his eyes looking back to make sure I’m there and he’s not lost, his face seeking mine checking that his orbit is still circling me. These impressions are brief flashes from long ago, and they are enough. Perhaps, if we could play the memory reel in flawless detail, we would be lost in the past and miss all that is happening in the moment.
🥲 I feel all the things... my heart echoes yours, Michelle. 🤗😘