"You get to an age where the stories don't matter anymore, and the stories once told so passionately become a tide that never quite reaches the point of being said. And there is no such thing as fate, but there are no accidents either." -Simon van Booy
They don't matter anymore. The teacher who left you out of the annual day dance at the last minute, the people who hurt a 12-year old you, the friends who betrayed you to hang out with each other on friendship day, the boy who broke your 16-year old heart and the constant jibes over the years about your chubbiness. The stories you told endlessly to each new best friend you made. Now, except for the heart break one, none are repeated. And the heart-break story is repeated only for effect. Only to let others know your emotional range does not exclude unrequited love. The big sympathy (or psycho) card.
Time has moved on.
You are used to being on your own and immersing yourself in television mythology. And enjoying it more than actual human interaction. It's easier feeling someone else's pain, easy to get jealous of someone's steamy romance and easy to rack your brains figuring out the plot twist. You know your guesses won't affect the outcome. They are someone else's business. Your feeling the pain of a crying matriarch and envy of the budding office romance of a TV hunk, can be forgotten after the the 20-45 minutes run time. It should be forgotten. It is mandatory. Rules outside this mythos are not clear. Should you remember? Should you forget?
You see, you don't intend to, but you forget. You forget names, faces, feelings. You forget what your dead uncle looked like. And grandma becomes a hazy memory from some other lifetime. Old photos point to days and people you vaguely remember. And you realise you remember them more from the repeated viewings of the photo album than from the actual memory. Your face suffers the same fate. You know you are looking at the 2-year old you because you are told so. Scientists have proven this. Sometimes what you think happened never happened and memories are not foolproof. The brain changes constantly, and so do memories. The plasticity of memory, long term potentiation, neuroregeneration in hippocampus. But now I am digressing into the realm of neuroscience. Terms from another distant lifetime.
Remembering is not easy.
You repeat your experience over and over again to various friends, various family members till it turns into an anecdote, a story. Enough repetitions, and you start spouting stock phrases to tell it. Even more repetitions, it becomes fiction. It becomes something you narrate. Something you spent time creating and polishing. A story you perform. With the right emphasis, right sighs, right pauses. Meaning belongs to a previous universe.
You have to constantly create new ones.
They don't matter anymore. The teacher who left you out of the annual day dance at the last minute, the people who hurt a 12-year old you, the friends who betrayed you to hang out with each other on friendship day, the boy who broke your 16-year old heart and the constant jibes over the years about your chubbiness. The stories you told endlessly to each new best friend you made. Now, except for the heart break one, none are repeated. And the heart-break story is repeated only for effect. Only to let others know your emotional range does not exclude unrequited love. The big sympathy (or psycho) card.
Time has moved on.
You are used to being on your own and immersing yourself in television mythology. And enjoying it more than actual human interaction. It's easier feeling someone else's pain, easy to get jealous of someone's steamy romance and easy to rack your brains figuring out the plot twist. You know your guesses won't affect the outcome. They are someone else's business. Your feeling the pain of a crying matriarch and envy of the budding office romance of a TV hunk, can be forgotten after the the 20-45 minutes run time. It should be forgotten. It is mandatory. Rules outside this mythos are not clear. Should you remember? Should you forget?
You see, you don't intend to, but you forget. You forget names, faces, feelings. You forget what your dead uncle looked like. And grandma becomes a hazy memory from some other lifetime. Old photos point to days and people you vaguely remember. And you realise you remember them more from the repeated viewings of the photo album than from the actual memory. Your face suffers the same fate. You know you are looking at the 2-year old you because you are told so. Scientists have proven this. Sometimes what you think happened never happened and memories are not foolproof. The brain changes constantly, and so do memories. The plasticity of memory, long term potentiation, neuroregeneration in hippocampus. But now I am digressing into the realm of neuroscience. Terms from another distant lifetime.
Remembering is not easy.
You repeat your experience over and over again to various friends, various family members till it turns into an anecdote, a story. Enough repetitions, and you start spouting stock phrases to tell it. Even more repetitions, it becomes fiction. It becomes something you narrate. Something you spent time creating and polishing. A story you perform. With the right emphasis, right sighs, right pauses. Meaning belongs to a previous universe.
You have to constantly create new ones.
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