Mental Media

This memoir, "Mental Media" is a recount of my realization that I was not fully living life. By that, I mean that I was not appreciating good times the way I should have been. This piece shows how and why I have changed my views on the way I experience things. I'm glad that I overcame this particular "stepping stone" early on, otherwise I probably would've accumulated a large amount of regrets.

My first memory of doing that ridiculous—yet, knowing my own personality, unavoidable—thing came in the second or third grade. It was a chilly day, back when I would take the school bus home. I still remember the worn-out grey seats, ridged walls, and misplaced windows that lined the entire vehicle. There was a kid sitting beside me who I never bothered to notice, so in my mind he or she is just a faceless, colorless blob. Apart from that, everything was more or less grey, and that’s because it was raining. Streaks of water ran down the glass that I was staring at. The windows wore a coat of fog, and just like all the other kids I drew shapes with my finger. We weren’t even halfway home yet but all the windows were now works of attempted art. I remember all of this well, and that’s because on that ride home in the second or third grade, as I was staring out at the rain with my mouth closed in a tight line, I did something that even I’m not sure the reason for. I fixed my eyes tight on the window, and in my head I thought: Remember this. And I did. Like taking a photograph, my first photograph on command, I remember that scene to this day.

            On my first day of grade eight, back when I never imagined my life going past my public school years, I found myself standing in a wide circle with my new peers. We were playing “the chicken game”, which was basically “the name game”, but instead of a ball, a yellow rubber chicken was being tossed around. The desks had all been shoved messily towards one side of the room; the side with the windows. For some odd reason I was in a fairly good mood—something rare for me on first-day-anything. Suddenly, one of my poorly-coordinated peers called my name and tossed the chicken about two meters to the right of me. It clunked against desk legs and disappeared under the tables. “I’ll get it,” I must have said, and then proceeded to bend down. There it was, on the brown-tiled floor, bright and painted with a panicked face. I began to extend my arm to reach for it. Remember this.

            There are more of these “mind photographs” that I have, and they all followed the same, general pattern. Eventually, I began to take them when I was at happy peaks. It didn’t take long for me to realize that what I was doing was trying to freeze moments in a way, as if I thought that by concentrating hard enough, the moment I was in would never pass. Of course, moments always do pass, and memories are, after all, just images that play out in the mind. It is the feelings that resurface, though never the same as the moment in which they first occurred, that matter. However, soon I also realized that many of these snapshots of happy times that I took were also tinged with a hint of sadness; a hint of loneliness.

            On a hot day in early May of my seventeenth year, I found myself at my good friend’s house, along with my best friend. It was afternoon-evening time, and we had wiped ourselves out after drinking heavily-sugared beverages and running through the neighbourhood like fools with bags of groceries. Our playlist of “Dance Songs!” was still ringing loudly in the background, but it was no longer welcomed. My friend, who had been boiling water for tea, abruptly stepped away from the stove to change the music to something more mellow, and rightfully so. I remember everyone’s shoulders sagging, as if finally relaxing and setting into the new, calmer pace of the evening. I opened the sliding door to the backyard and stepped out into warm spring air, and soon we were all outside. Sipping tea, wearing oversized sweaters and still listening to that calming music...we all had smiles plastered onto our faces. I remember my feet were dangling over the edge of the patio, the cup of Earl Grey tea sat in my palms, warm and smooth, and I was staring at the quickly darkening sky while trying to remember what it was that I had to do. There was this urge in the back of my mind, prodding at my conscience, telling me to…rem…emb…

            It never happened.

            I could describe to you an entire collection of pictures: some dark, most bright; some irreplaceably tinged with joy, and some laminated with a faint hope. I hope this lasts forever. This feels like ‘happy’ to me. This is what I wanted for so long. Now I’ve got it. I could describe all of these snapshots to you, but that evening, the one at the house with my friends, I could recount to you the entire movie that I lived through.

            Memories like that, they are the ones that came from moments were I smiled uncontrollably wide and felt tingles all up and down my skin. They were so good that I never even took a picture. I realize now that it’s because those were the moments that were the most real. I lived through them with no filter, just pure emotion and reaction, and therefore they are the ones I remember best. In my mind, they are not a single build up to a scene, but instead they feel more like a long storyline, with positive emotions spread out along them like butter. Looking back, I have a lot, like waking up as a toddler on some mornings to my cousins’ smiling faces and then spending the day with them. There was the afternoon I got what I dreamed of as an awkward pre-teen: my first kiss. Even better were the hours I sat with my best friend at Second Cup and had some of the deepest conversations…and more, of course, but not as much as I could have. And that’s because in a way I had been stopping myself.

By becoming this “mental photographer”, I had transformed into someone who sought to find great moments in life, as a result of a hidden panic that time would slip by and be worth nothing. Alas, by thinking in this way, I kept myself from living life in that raw way that we are meant to do. It has occurred to me now that amazing things definitely happen, and they are best when they build up and appear before us. If we anxiously await them, however, they become spoiled.

This is all a happy realization, though. What better thing to realize than the fact that I should enjoy life more freely? It will feel wonderful to find myself in a situation, sometime soon, where I am not holding my mental camera in jittery hands, but instead smiling bright and realizing, “Ah, this is one of those fantastic moments”. There are so many more memories to build, and it makes me happy that I am nowhere close to being done with my newfound collection of mental movies.