Memory is Weird

I'm not high, I swear

Photo by Pascal Debrunner on Unsplash

Memory is weird.

The scent of a retail store might remind you of that time in high school when you strolled through the mall next to your mom and she said, “That smells like marijuana,” when it most certainly did not, and from that moment on, you knew with certainty that your mom didn’t know what pot smelled like.

The texture of an animal’s fur might bring with it the sense of calm you haven’t experienced since babyhood: indescribable, but clearly experienced primal comfort.

The sound of a particular vehicle might put you back on the seat of a Honda, cradling your ex’s leather jacket with the rush of wind in your eyebrows.

And sometimes, memory makes no sense.

It is a cognitive non-sequitur.

When my husband gave me backrubs in years past, every time without fail - once my body relaxed and my mind felt safe - I would remember something. Literally, one thing - usually a moment; an incident. A propos of nothing other than the back rub, I would remember, say, a dream I once had as a child in the 80’s about my cat drifting up into the blue sky in a hot air balloon, waving down at four-year-old me. Four-year-old me happily gazed up into the balloon, at my cat, as I stood on a suburban sidewalk in Calgary, in a dream, without a clue that I would one day remember this moment as I received a back rub on a lumpy futon in a one-room apartment in Little Portugal in 2015.

Rocky-ish mountains…you get the picture, 2014

Memory is fucking weird.

On other occasions I would recall the way the mountains first appeared as we approached them driving up the Trans-Canada highway, or that time we almost ran off the road, or that time one of us got caught shoplifting.

Nothing to do with back rubs, or relaxation per se, or the things I was sensing or feeling at that particular time. With each precisely parceled memory came the slow realization that this must be what it feels like to have one’s “life flash before your very eyes…”

Not in chronological order, though, but very slowly over the course of years.

Seasons trigger memories, of course. Moods do, too. As do flavours, melodies, and altered states of mind brought on by drugs.

But what about those memories without triggers?

Why, when I am standing alone in silence in my kitchen washing dishes in Muskoka, do I remember dancing to John Orpheus’ pumping rock and roll band in an art gallery in Kitchener 8 years ago?

Memories are maybe just dreams we have when we are awake.

Maybe dreams are memories of our known or unknown pasts and futures: the most mundane dream sequence an intricate composition of all we have amalgamated into our humble lifetime of existence.

Memories are our way of piecing together what our minds lose track of, but our souls insist we must never forget.

Sure.

Let’s go with that.