Only Memories Remain

June 2, 2021



I , KJ and Mo have this story (🚂) from 12 years back! It's a story that is almost like a foundational event to a friendship, and all deep friendships have these pivotal stories. We narrate it between us every 3-4 months maybe? But we definitely narrate it when there is a fourth person amongst us. Over the years, with each retelling, we get better at the narrative, so much that we can almost know from habit who is the main narrator and when does one make that quip that gets everyone in splits. We can tell each others' lines and we know which particulars we'll leave depending on the space, the listener and the time. It's almost like that memory has been choreographed, every little detail is so vivid, so immaculate. Like we've lived through this fun little memory a hundred times. I can't say so much about a lot of my own personal experiences, as over time these incidents seem to get smaller, replaced by more recent events, and then just fade into oblivion. There are only a handful of events I can remember without a trigger or much thought. My memory is faulty too, hindsight vision is romanticised and perfect, and don't know how much it can account for the truth, question it thrice and I'll wonder if it was a figment of my imagination. As transient as I am, I change, these memories just become too redundant to keep, and as I change, the relevance of some memories is easily lost upon me, too small for it to be a big deal, turning into a BTW fact of my life. Not everything makes it to the journal of our lived experience. And that's the thing about shared experiences. Our collective experience makes them intangible, something you don’t tamper with. They tend to live longer, more brightly lit up in our memory palaces, making your life feel warmer, shinier, in a way individual experiences can't. It makes you part of someone else's story and you a part of theirs ❤️. Something bigger. //Only Memories Remain - My Morning Jacket