pictures of memories

my mom famously said once how, if we didn't make pictures of an event or moment, then all we would have are our memories - and i quote, "...that will die with us!" now, my mom is known around these parts for a certain unmitigated hyperbole concerning most things. i learned some of this from her, i admit it. but i thought this declaration about memories was just too over the top and too morbid, even for her. i laughed and laughed about it. then rolled my eyes. then laughed again. i've been laughing for years about it.

then i found myself at a stoplight the other day, in hot july, watching a young blond man, dressed all in black, walking determinedly down the street - a very like image of my current husband, as he looked 20 years ago now, walking down this very street, during the hot summer when we first dated. such a flood of melancholy caught me, as i leaned forward and squinted my eyes, trying to erase the details of the current scene so i could visually, concretely re-experience the memory and long-lost image of a boy i so madly loved walking down a city street in mid-summer. it was as though my memory had been made separate and real for just a moment - real enough again to see it not only in my mind's eye, where i often revisit it, but in flesh and blood, the real pavement releasing real heat, a real person - alike enough for the vision - enacting a real scene from a memory that only i can see in just its way within my mind.

suddenly, at that stoplight, watching this, i knew exactly what my mother meant. what a sadness, to not be able to show my husband this beautiful image i save of him in my mind and heart. my memories can only be mine alone ... and yes, what loss to have these die with us.

it was sobering and made me feel a sense of longing for others' beautiful and horrible and awesome and individual perceptions and images and visions i will never see or know because of the nature of the human mind and memory. closed, internal, separate. it made me feel very much alone to think of it this way in that moment. i want to keep these images. share them. gift them to their subjects or my child. a way to transcribe thoughts and brain waves - the electrical patterns of memory - into actual media we might share and understand. not art - not writing, not picture-making - but true transcriptions of memory, an exact recording of our thoughts' form. it's the stuff of science fiction, i suppose, wishing for these pictures of memories.