Why would the most important detail of such a vivid memory fade?
_
I have been studying for the bar exam all day and I have a lot more to do. But suddenly, my head was flooded with a rush of nostalgic emotion. I have no idea what triggered the memories, but everything about the first week of my 2015 Euro-trip came rushing into my head.
Particularly the three days I spent at the Fabric Hostel & Club in Portici, outside of Naples.
I remember everything about those few days so vividly, but something is wrong now: I am forgetting her face.
I paused my video lecture, closed my notebook and conducted a search for her on Facebook and Instagram. It is the same search I’ve done once every six months or so since the last time I saw her in the summer of 2015. Again, I hit a dead end. Again, I failed to find her. This is the same result I get every time, but it hurts more now because I can’t picture her clearly anymore. I remember her laugh, her voice, what she wore and what her perfume smelled like, but all I have to go on is a first name and a city.
I only stopped scouring the internet for her when I realized that simply typing “Megan from Toronto” into google is futile.
I can picture all the other people I met in the hostel, the locales we visited while bar-hopping along the coast, even the layout of the hostel and the streets I walked from the train station to get there. I remember the day-trips to Pompeii, Capri, and the Amalfi coast. I remember everything about that weekend so clearly, but for the first time… I am having trouble remembering her face.
There is a problem I have when I am meeting women abroad, and this is particularly true with Megan from Toronto: I did not realize I how strongly I felt about her until after my time with her was over.
When you are traveling, you are living in the moment. You are wide awake, wrapping yourself up in every new experience as they come at you in full speed minute-by-minute. It’s easy to get lost in it all and forget to ask something as simple as “what’s your last name?”
At least that’s what I tell myself to rationalize my idiocy.
In this current reflection, here are the questions I ask myself: Am I just emotionally attached to the memories of that week? Is this only nostalgia for the feelings I felt during the moments her and I shared, or am I truly longing for her, the person with whom I spent those moments and made those memories?
I suppose it would be easy for someone to answer those questions for me by simply saying, “you two only knew each other for a few days… there is no way anyone could actually feel so intensely for another person after such a short period of time.” And I suppose an argument could be made for the idea that what I am missing is merely the moments themselves, and I could have been with anyone and still feel the way I feel now. Everything about our environment was so new and, although I haven’t the clue about what she is up to now, our lives were so carefree during that brief period.
But I think there is something supremely unique about any person that you are able to share a new and exciting experience with. The relationship you form with one another during that time uncompetitively special. This is because, no matter who I tell the story to, no matter how precisely I detail our time together, no matter how similar an experience you may have had is to mine… there is only one other person on this planet who was there. I can try as hard as I can to put you in my shoes, but the only other person who shared what we shared, did the things we did, and felt the things we felt… was her. Yes, I may be emotionally attached to those moments… but they were with her. Yes, it very well could have been anyone else… but it wasn’t.
Whether we realized it or not we spent our time like it was our last few days on earth with one another… and each year that goes by, each fruitless Facebook search that comes crashing to an end, I realize more and more, that they actually may have been.
and I am forgetting her face.
Photo Cred: Luciano Apice