brain thoughts

Tuesday, oct. 10, 2006   |   0 comments

Most of my memories are fleeting things, a faint echo of a particular emotion, or a general impression of how something used to look—My Childhood Home—which is really just an amalgam of multiple days or moments all overlapping and blurring together into one faded mental snapshot.

But I also have this small collection of special memories that somehow always stay fresh and close to the surface. While regular memories take a smell or a sound to trigger them, all I have to do to access one of these super memories is close my eyes, and I’m right back in that moment, feeling and thinking and experiencing things exactly as though I was right in there. If it’s a childhood memory—and these kinds of memories usually are—my body even feels smaller. And I feel the smoothness of my worn flannel Lanz nightgown, the skin on my young knee actually feels tighter, sounds, smells, the quality of light in the room…it’s all so real, it doesn’t feel like a memory, it feels like time travel.

I wonder if it has something to do with the way memories are stored? Maybe these super memories exist right at the very core of the memory vault, or they’re like an elevator shaft running through a hotel with cheap walls: they’re accessible from many levels, and you can always feel, sense, hear, even smell their nearby rumbling.