Same In Blues

There's a new application [app, if you will--but I won't] for the iPhone. I do not own an iPhone, and I only know about this application from various other bloggers--it's called Hipstamatic, and the premise is that it gives your photos the patina from various old camera types, Polaroids and the like. You know, the supersaturated or too-bright faded or scratchy-looking photos of your youth. Or, in my case, my parents' youth. I think it's funny, that we take cameras that can take perfectly clear dime-a-dozen photos and make them look less clear, more fuzzy.

I'm not making fun of Hipstamatic, not by any stretch of the imagination. The phone I'm temporarily using runs the Android OS, which as a similar application--Vignette. Which I love, by the way.

But I do think it's funny, our attempts to inject nostalgia into our very real and present lives. The pictures I take in Vignette look like the pictures my parents took when my dad was in grad school, or when they were dating in high school. I'm so familiar with these pictures, part of the mythology of my parents. Sitting on the back of a car, age 15. My father, at his desk in the apartment in Indiana, our old green and blue paisley couch in the corner and a stack of books that rivals the one on my desk now. My parents, 22 or 23--younger than I am now--with a very tiny me. Faded out. Less clear. Fuzzy, by now.

Our pictures are like our memories. Only these, we start out fuzzy. Like we're only giving them half a chance.

***

There are defining moments of each stage in your life--you just don't know it when you're experiencing them. They sneak up on you, steal a piece of your soul and slink away.

There's a rainy day in high school and a gray sweater.

A story about someone's mother and a speed bump. A failed camping trip and a waterfall swelling with flood waters. A foggy night and a soup bowl full of tears. One hundred clandestine drawings passed forward and backward through Organic Chemistry.

Two simultaneously opening elevators, a prescription monocle and a two-hit hypothesis.

I wonder about the defining events of now, of my life with Joey. We're about to move into a new place, out of our first apartment. We're molting out of the shell we've made together. I think about the things we'll carry--the kitchen floor he's picked knives off of (telling me he was reconsidering having children with someone who drops knives on the floor and doesn't pick them up), the couch where we sink into each other to watch TV. The bed, where he reads me Scott Pilgrim out loud, where I fell asleep today cuddled up to him in a way I rarely do. Our life together--my car, where as he held my hand while I drove across the bridge last week, he turned and said, "I love living here with you." Our favorite restaurant, where we sit outside with friends on a Saturday evening and laugh into the fading light of an almost-summer dusk.

These events, standing out like telephone poles--our memories in-between traversing the gaps, carrying whispered words via electricity over time and space.

***

Charlie has a bad habit of forgetting things once he's drunk. I didn't know this at first, but eventually I noticed that I had to explain things over and over again. Night after night spent together, the same surprise over the thumb stuck defiantly in my mouth. Or days after, when I reference something we talked about or did--not remembering. I make fun of him. But at the same time--

I worry that I will be forgotten. That someday, there will be no more flickers of the lighter, no more mixed drinks. No arms winding drunkenly around each others' backs or in the crooks of each others' elbows. That one day, I'll wake up on a couch that isn't mine and just walk away. Into another life.

I know that everything I do on earth, I will do for a last time. The last time I ever feed cells. The last time I sit and talk to a patient as a student doctor. The last time I give birth. The last time I have sex or kiss someone on the lips.

The idea that everything will be done for the last time doesn't intrinsically bother me. What really gets to me is the idea that I won't see it coming. That the last time will slip away with the ease of our ocean breezes, the ones that kick up tiny pieces of sand that graze your skin as they slide on by.

So I hold my hands out in the wind, grasping at ghosts and the fading pieces of my own synapses. No matter what, I beg them in their sleep. Just promise to remember this.