Mementos as Resort for Distraction
The true spirit of memories lies within one’s perception of the event. The past is the stories we tell ourselves. Everything that has happened, shared or not, lead us into where we are at this moment. Things disappear forthwith impulsively, then return back to you again impulsively. They came in forms of incompleteness, blurred among all the time we spent between there and now. Vivid recollections are often exclusive to only significant experiences in our life. The inability to relive all our valued past asks for us to only visit them in scattered pieces.
That’s why we keep of mementos, a thing we keep that are in ways a physical manifestation of our past, abundance of sentimental values attached to immaterial items. We know that pure precious memories will never vanish even if you discard the things associated with them, yet we hold dear of the things that showed us minor slices of what happened, commemorating what’s done.
In these trying times, why not distract ourselves from the anxieties of the major devastation that is leading the world into spiral of just overwhelmingly dreadful historical events we’re watching happen with our own two eyes to just — reminisce. All the productivity guide for quarantine you’ve done, fancy yourself to a trip down nostalgic roads.
Shambles of containers, you’ll find rarities, traces of lives lived, painful or pleasant as it may be, they shaped into who you are. The Harvest paper bag you kept that contained a cake you gave to your once significant other, the developed roll of film, negatives of faces you now turned to hate, the plastic bag from Disneyland pulling you back into the wavering innocence of a 14 year-old. The wedding invitations for a couple that are no longer married, ukulele you bought then abandoned two weeks after buying, old cinema tickets you saw with your best friend that you haven’t talked to in years.
However you find solace in a world that never make sense, this is just one way alleviating the common hardship we unfortunately have to deal with. A step beyond is to do more than reminiscing. Reaching out, maybe mending the loose ties, expressing how you feel toward someone, but there’s no harm in only getting some sentimentalism in you.
To quote from the great Joan Didion:
“In theory mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.” ― Joan Didion, Blue Nights
Inescapable from our eyes by aid of anxiety terrors induced from social media, the current circumstances exposed each and every day might lead us into the feeling of lost unattainable desires, pipe dreams, sense of perpetual despair, constant state of grief and sorrow. Wishes are for us to shed some light over all that is happening, spare some hopes to keep us going with our own individual dreams. The sudden amnesiac from the times before the gloom is common, we tend to forgot the precious days and nights that went through, that we easily took for granted. Conjure up some glass-half-full thinking, that what the future hold, might be as pretty as it once was, just like the mementos.
Written on 26 April 2020
