Treasure Memories.

    Memories are funny things. They can be vivid and bright and sharp, or they can be diffuse and nebulous. Some that are intangible and fleeting like feelings and sensations will linger, while faces and voices become undefined, eroded by the distance of time, then brought back into sharp relief, briefly, by a photograph. Memories are fickle things.

    This is what I've been pondering in the last few days, as my sister has been digging into the archives to piece together our family tree. 

    My parents have been excavating layered old albums full of faded and yellow, and grey and grainy photographs. Each one they unearth brings back a surge of nostalgia and comfort; The same happy contentment I felt as a child when around the people in those pictures. Those people whose faces, now much altered by age, or long gone, swam in the air above me as I played with toys, or prodded at frogs in the pond, or imagined what the snails were thinking about; Having conversations that didn't involve me, as they were relating to things from another world; a higher plane of existence called Adulthood... 

    Those kodak and polaroid fossils demonstrate to me exactly how much I have lost from my memories. Each one is a time capsule, and by brushing my hand across them and allowing my eyes to dwell upon them, I am permitted a glimpse through a grimy window into the past, and into memories spoiled by neglect.

    I can remember the shapes and colours and smells of my grandparents, but they are hazy. If I try to conjure their faces in front of my eyes, they are indistinct, or they are freeze-framed like in the most recent photo of them that I have seen. It has brought home how important it is to really look at people, to really see them. To hear their voices, and to really listen to their words, and the sound of them; The grumble and the shriek, the laugh and the sigh. 

    No one is here forever, and so we must pay attention, every moment that we can, as all too quickly they will be nothing more than a fading memory. And then lost.