Trauma came for my memories one day and held them hostage. A chunk of my life bound and gagged, surreptitiously plotting an escape it isn’t brave enough to go through with.
I thought they’d be back by now. I miss them, wherever they’ve gone.
Lord knows I’ve tried to find memories the way one searches for missing loved ones, flyers and candlelight vigils and all. But after nine years, they probably won’t be found, don’t want to be found, and I may not recognize them if they finally did show up. They’d probably be glossy-eyed and oddly perfect, scrubbed clean of their familiar smell.
After all, Trauma is a predator. It is greedy. It takes without asking, without warning. It takes, even if it has already taken so much before.
And so I have become obsessed with the ways I can now use my phone to self-document. Compulsively creating tens of thousands of technological artifacts all organized into categories, album types, and highlights, always a tap away from coming back to life, back to the surface.
I have effectively grown up in my camera roll. I have fallen in love there, grieved there, celebrated there, been rebuilt there. And should Trauma come back for my memories this time, at least I’ve got copies.
My phone is a pocket-sized time capsule. At any given moment, I am scrolling back to D.C in 2016, to Miami in 2020, to New York in early 2022. I can time travel in the lobbies of doctors’ offices, in long Starbucks lines, in the chairs of hair salons, and first thing every morning. I am only ever here when I need to be.
No one tells you that when someone dies, eventually all of their delicate little details die too. There is labor in remembrance, and I wish I’d known before he was gone.
I wish I did not also come of age in the clumsiness of disposable cameras, where old photos were bound to get lost in the shuffle between moves from this house to that one. Or data etched on the memory cards of a Canon Snapshot in some forgotten storage box. I wish I had the ability sooner, to stash away memories before I’d need them, before I was sure I’d mourn them. I wish I was a better steward of a story, more protective, more prepared. I wish I’d kept the audio clips of a voice I’d never hear again, of events for which I’d later have no record. Of things I am never quite sure I’ve invented just to soothe the uncertainty.
Aging is only really interesting so long as it yields a history. But what if you’ve gotten older without evidence of your youth? What if you wake up with mysterious scars and no knowledge of how they got there? Or carry deep longing without remembering what it is you’ve lost? Or experience the passage of time without the context to anchor it?
What if you just forget?
I can’t forget again. I must capture it all, hoard it, bury it for safekeeping, for some kind of guarantee. In case there are ever questions to answer. Realities to verify, to cross-reference, to reimagine.
I can no longer trust myself to discern which memories to collect, and which to let evaporate. What an impossible decision to make anyway. What blind faith to a mind that has failed me before, that is still keeping secrets from my past. How will I know it will tell me the truth when I ask? How can I be sure it will cherish the relics of what little it has left?