Our memories are lies we tell ourselves in order to go on living.
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I see them everywhere I go. Faces from my past. Old lovers. Parents of dead friends. An enemy who never got the satisfaction he sought. Acquaintances of acquaintances who only put up with me because they had to.
The only thing we ever had in common was being from here.
I’ve been going through my old CD book, driving these hometown streets with the music of my young adult life. It’s a time capsule written by my younger self. I stopped buying physical albums about 10 years ago, so Devendra Banhart’s in there, along with Wolf Parade and Okkervil River. Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. Bands on Saddle Creek Records. Mid-level indie groups, most didn’t make it. Listening to them now is like time-traveling back to Mistakeville, the Land of Regrets and Poor Decisions, and Memory Lane is a dark alley where thugs with sticks and whips lurk in the shadows, waiting to attack. Much of it evokes memories of people I no longer have in my life. People I no longer am.
I’ve tried to put it all behind me. Nostalgia only rots with the passage of time. I can work to remember the good times, fond moments, but often evoking those feels like a distortion, a culling of only the best stock when the real story is the whole herd.
Our memories are lies we tell ourselves in order to go on living.
What time in our lives have we ever lived without pain, without trouble? To remember only the good parts is to forget the parts that made you want to leave or change your life. No, I have never known Salad Days, or Golden Years. I have never not wanted more.
People wield their memories of a person like a cattle prod, charged, held in hand as a deterrent rarely used but there if things don’t go the direction they would like. If they turn on you and you become the subject of their remembering, how do you defend yourself? There is no recourse against the selective memory, no escape from the chute of how they choose to remember you.
I repeat this like a mantra: “The only life you have is the one you’re living in this moment. You’re not who you once were. You’re only you now.”
When I used to come home to visit I was overwhelmed by it. The old connections to people and places came without trying, wanting, or warning. It’s taken two years, but I’m through that now. I’ve lived here long enough that the pain of the passage of my childhood has left hardened scars. I’m inured to the past, let it simply exist without recognition. Only by living here and confronting it have I been able to finally put it down, to end it, to move beyond who I once was and how this place once defined me.
The nostalgia is dead. Good riddance.
Follow Bart Schaneman on Twitter at @bartschaneman.
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This article originally appeared on Medium for Human Parts.
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