6 minute read
do you remember, gold? that’s
Do You Remember, Gold?
by JESSIE YIN
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layout SHUER ZHUO photographer RACHEL AQUINO stylists GIGI FEINGOLD & SAGE WALKER hmua ZIMEI CHEN & YEONSOO JUNG models MARIE BENNETT & CALLIE KURPIEWSKI
That’s The History, Blue.
become emotional cornerstones in our lives. We have no control over the memories that
Eleven minutes to sunset ... Sitting in that cafe, I told you everything.
The walls were yellow, peeling near the bottom molding, and we sat at a table in the corner, just the two of us. Through the windows, outside this world of two, the sky was glazing the streets in gold. It was the beginning of summer, when those Texas days started to stretch into the night as slow and sweet as molasses, and it felt like that sunset lasted forever. In my memory, that sun took a year and a day to end.
If someone were to ask me half a lifetime from now what you meant to me, I would tell them about this summer sunset. We had known each other for much longer at this point, but the actual measure of time bears no weight here. This is the memory that I will carry with me as the essence of us, of this era in my life long after it has passed.
We all have memories like that. Singular moments that sink into our consciousness and only grow from there. They come to represent, in their entirety, people we loved and places we lived, all those little sidewalk-crack moments of living.
Memories can be physical. The ones that we can’t help but remember become marks on our mental geographies. When we remember them, it can feel like being in two places at once. When I drive across the bridge on Lamar, and that Austin skyline emerges across the river, for a second, I’m out of time and out of space. Almost superimposed over that sight are images of myself in years past, walking along the streets and pouring out different portions of my heart to anyone who’d listen. Like magic, a place that is squarely in the past has been made present again.
Just by living, by existing in this world, we change it. The memories of our feelings linger, even after we are barely affected by them, after we are so far removed from that person we used to be that they are no more than a stranger. We leave them like little lantern lights to drift through our lives.
Four minutes to sunset ...
When I think about my freshman year, it’s an eternal autumn during those precious few days of cold weather, and I’m sitting at the bus stop behind my dormitory. Through my headphones, Vance Joy sings, “Remember how we were like Gold, when you see me…that’s the history, Blue, how we used to roar like an open fire,” and I’m finishing the cup of coffee I got from work as I watch the sun sink below the sloping hills of Dean Keaton. In the span of a few short songs, the world goes from burnished gold, a gentle hearth, to a blue so deep and so hazy that it emerges before the true night like a dream I was never meant to have. I think I was somehow a lonelier girl back then.
Now in my senior year, I don’t understand why this memory of a few autumn days has come to dictate everything I feel about that first year of college. Why is this innocuous scene what I always come back to? Like a compass needle, my thoughts seem to spin and spin around before they inevitably orbit back into these familiar grooves. Sometimes, it drives me crazy how imprecise our memories are. These small moments will loom larger than their bare-bone facts should allow. Meanwhile, there are so many things we forget as routinely and as easily as the sun sets. We lose birthdays and anniversaries, book titles and movie endings, and there is no lost and found for the parts of our lives that disappear.
I remember reading once that depression and trauma have been determined to have an indelible effect on our memory. They diligently and ruthlessly make Swiss cheese of our recollections. Pain is an effective eraser for chunks of our lives while etching into the walls its darker legacies. Sometimes, I want to beg it to give these things back to me. I stand at the burning pyre of my own hurts and demand that I should be allowed small states of happiness, little mundanities instead. In the darkest of nights, let me hold onto the warmth of my own mind.
Zero minutes to sunset ...
Sometimes, I accidentally pay attention to those 20-or-so minutes when the sky goes from gold to blue. Golden hour and blue hour: those little parts right before and after sunset. It’s not quite part of the day or night, and not part of what we usually consider that moment of sunset. I’m laughing in a park with my friends, and suddenly, with no consideration on my part, the sunlight dies and is consumed by a bruised blue. I feel so alone even surrounded by people. For a moment, I have to learn how to return to myself of the golden hour, asking desperately, how would I act if I were me?
In this liminal space of blue and gold, the passage of time is so abrupt and so apparent in the colors of our world. It looks like how remembering feels: abstract and impermanent. This is how these moments come back to me. Sometimes they come simply as nostalgia, but sometimes they come out more as mourning. I don’t want to remember every time that I’ve cried, that I’ve been left untethered by the course of living, but I can’t help it.
I’ve come to believe that we have no control over the memories that become emotional cornerstones in our lives. We don’t get to pick the things that stick with us eons from now.
Nine minutes past sunset ...
In the comforting dusk of a spring night, my friend told me about heartbreak, about how he hung his hopes on a hopeless relationship. As I pleated a navy quilt between my fingers, I wondered if he would ever be able to look back on these years and not see the immense shadow that this boy has cast through the seasons. I wonder now if there are expiration dates on memories, if I even want there to be. Do we ever truly get to move on, or do we live and die carrying within our hearts everyone we have ever loved? Even after they’re gone, even after they no longer love us back? In picking at why remembering can be so unworldly, I worry that I’m committing some kind of faux pas, like asking an artist to explain their work. Maybe we just aren’t supposed to examine the tenuous workings of our own recollections so closely. I can and have sat on my couch for hours, pondering whether there is rhyme or reason to my memories, but it’s akin to tasting for smoke where there is no fire. Maybe memory is meant to be something as inexplicable and as fleeting as a sunset, and we are the ones who have to make peace with our non-answers.
As the last of the ephemeral colors slip into a dark night, I want to ask you, “Do you remember?” ■
