Camera Roll

In today’s age, or rather, my age, there is a cyclical filmstrip that reminds us constantly and incorrigibly of who we once were. We see vast reflections of ourselves as if in mirrors suspended across time. These mirrors, of course, are video screens, photographs, reminding every day one of two inevitable truths, either — you have strayed too far from what you once were, or the far worse: you are too much the same. This filmstrip suspends the delicate balance of losing and finding oneself into eternal memory, where progress is constantly put into perspective — there is always more work to be done. Memory is forced into a linear form, where its function isn’t so much to preserve as it is to remind, that On This Day, July —, 20 —, you were here, with this person, doing this, and feeling that, and how different it is to how you are feeling now, or maybe it reminds you of how much you still feel like that, and perhaps you always will. 

Life is construed into a mirage, a barrage of signs, each one informing how to look, how to feel, how to remember. These digital memories, these refractions upon refractions, distort as much as they help to see. A tree is a tree because we remember it as such, there is no doubting the merit of that type of memory, but now oftentimes when I see a tree, I am reminded of a photograph I once took of another tree, one that perhaps had some meaning to me, and the tree before me then splits and transforms into an image not its own. Now, to say that this is a novel experience would be naive of me, but I don’t seek to write about the past, about what discoveries lie there. Rather, as I have said, I am writing about my age, and what is found here, through these set of eyes. Eyes that are simultaneously my own and not my own. 

Let me boil this down into more visceral terms. Today, while scrolling aimlessly through my phone, I stumbled upon a video I had recorded two years and two days ago, in which I asked questions with the hope that I would find them a year later and have answers. Now, of course, the subject of such questions catapulted into the future is already in my past. After some searching, I found the answers I had left to those questions a year ago, and another set of questions that I am to answer today. The questions themselves were rather mundane, some were even funny, but I found myself somewhat despondent. That despondency came from a strange cacophony of emotions — grief, nostalgia, regret, and simultaneous hatred, of both who I was then, and who I am now. For both can neither live up to the other. I felt rather lost, adrift between everything I was and wasn’t, incomplete in perpetuity. 

But then I thought back to the memories contained within myself, my own memories, and found that none of that hatred, none of that grief existed. For I knew, somehow, that whatever vistages of the past that lie in crumpled heaps in my brain were not there to hurt me. They have faded into the intangible. Our mind is our own medic, healing as it hurdles forward, leaving nothing but emptiness behind. There I found the source of my despondency. Our digital libraries reconfigure the past into something more substantial, bringing what is warm, soft, and fuzzy into new, startling, and cold light. These recordings don’t simply conjure up memories from the past, they create a new past, situating it in a conundrum where it is doomed to fail from the start, because this past is constantly and unavoidably compared to the present. 

Now, it is not my intention to denounce all types of media, or the recording and preservation of memories; I still, like everyone my age, am in a hopeless relationship with my phone. I am only trying to make sense of it all. These digital memories are a part of me as anything else is, and they bring joy and happiness along with the rest. It is that contradiction, that fusion of life and the past and the self and what is no longer the self into something we carry with us every day, in our pockets, in our purses, that interests me. It is conceivably a feeling that no other age has felt before. I embrace it, let it in, let it fill me with despondency, because I am also moved by it. And it may be all simply a distraction from what is here, in front of us, from the now-ness that is as lonely as it is omnipresent, but I believe that this truth can live alongside the other. That two things can co-exist — memories and non-memories, the past and the present.