From Today to Yesterday

Tonight as I settled behind the wheel, I turned the on heater and as a blast of warm air bathed my face I caught a slight hint of that new car smell still hiding somewhere way back in the vents of my car. I had not smelled this smell in months. Slowly as I became accustomed to my car, climbing in and out everyday that smell faded from notice. But tonight I was falling back in time to the moment I opened my driver's side door for the first time on the car lot. The smell was so strong as it wafted out into the muggy night air. The memory is so sharp that the whole scene is laid out before me from the way the halogen lot lights changed the shade of my shirt, to the bite of my purse upon my shoulder, down to the way the bottom of my feet were slightly sticky against my plastic bottomed sandals.

Often one thing can be so associated with another that you don't even realize it is gone, or changed, or missing till something jolts you back to how it used to be. Long after the event has come or gone or the person has come in and left out of our lives the smell or taste of them is still sitting on your brain in intangible drops hidden beneath a tangled mass of years but when you come upon them they are poignant edifices of memory. Falling into one can conjure up a complex vision of the things you love, the things that make you who you are today, and the things you never want to lose.

This is how a song will come on my iPod and I will be insantly be transported back to an aisle of Target trying to decide between plum and purple nail polish. It is how I will almost be able to feel the warm beat of the sun upon the apple of my cheeks as I walked across campus towards home just by a the smell of freshly mowed grass. It is how a passages of a book will bring back the heaviness of heart from a time when the words were more than literature but reflected my own feelings. It is almost as if it was a short cut from today to then, from now to yesterday. A direct string that could pull me back to that very moment that my nose was full of a lover's perfumed skin or I felt the crackle beneath my hands of breaking ribs the first time I did CPR.

While some memories are vaulted to the front of our minds, most moments in our lives are ever so ephemeral; gone with a beat of a butterfly’s wings. Our lives are fluid and wash into the past second by second, lost forever. What is it that makes some moments go missing in the muck and mire of my memory, subject to the ravages of a corporeal vault, while others are so brilliant that they blaze when visited? I can tell you what Red will order at almost every restaurant in the greater Austin area, exactly where Flip left his flash drive, the very shade of deep azure blue The Preacher's eyes are, or the way Frankie clasps his hands and crinkles his left eye when he laughs, but cannot tell you how old I was when I learned to whistle, what my fourth grade teacher's name was, or a single pair of shoes I had before the age of 15. The mind chooses memories like a child collecting rocks. Some are chosen for their aesthetic value, some for their size, but most are chosen indiscriminately, plucked from obscurity and made special.

As calendar days flicker past, more of my life will slip between the thin pinch in the hourglass. Before I know it, most of my sand will have settled along the bottom. Reviewing my past, I will not be able to remember days, but will only be able to remember moments. My life available for recall at an instant when the most amount of memories will be at my disposal. While my mistakes and regrets will surely come to mind, I hope there will be memories that will warm the cockles of my heart, memories that I cannot even list here because the best is yet to come. Those memories will be the sum total of who I am, for good or bad because even at the end the past is never dead.