It's a pleasant early-summer afternoon here while I'm writing this. When I got up this morning, I was feeling grumpy, tousled, and old. I was worrying about the things I had to do today, plans everyone had, a to-do checklist of odds and ends. But right now, as the sunlight begins to filter into the office, I'm suddenly in a completely different mood: lighter, airier. I'm experiencing sensations I haven't felt in a while – a sense of relaxation and comfort, mixed with that summer anticipation of fun times to come. The feeling's so strong, it's even driving away my awareness of old-person aches and pains. Where did it come from?

Oh, I know. It that Proust thing. The sort of déjà senti I tend to get when the seasons change. It's harking back to my childhood, a time when I lived in the subtropics. Summers were long and lazy there, and being a kid, I didn't have any responsibilities to speak of. Those sensations are pleasant memories.

Has it ever occurred to you that you’re a walking time machine? You carry around those memories. A trigger, or even a conscious effort, can bring those sensations back to you. The world that made those memories can be long-buried under floodwaters or gentrification, but you – and you alone – can resurrect them in an instant.

Isn't it amazing that you can do that?

What's even more amazing: they tell us our bodies completely replace themselves, cell for cell, every seven years. But that memory, the one I'm experiencing now, is eight-times-seven years removed from this space/time locus. So how is it that I can still recall it, almost at will?

I'm a time machine. And it's not made of biochemistry. Hmpf. Far out.

What can I use this for? Oh, I know. I can put it down in stories. I can write about it. Then, even after I'm not here anymore, somebody can find it, like the lost scent of an extinct flower. It's like the probe that took over Captain Picard's brain one stardate and made him experience the life of a man on a long-lost planet whose star had been a burnt-out husk for millennia. They only sent the message to say, 'We were here. We lived. Remember us.'

So enjoy your own sunlit memories. Let them come. Remember to use them. Write them down. Preserve them, like the petals of a flower pressed in an old book. Someday, someone will open the book. They'll find the scent unfamiliar, but intriguing. And they'll know. 'We were here. We lived. Remember us.'

Writing Right with Dmitri Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

11.06.18 Front Page

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