Chasing a Dead Memory

When an experience is no longer remembered, it's already dead.

I used to believe my memory could hold on to everything. Now time has taught me otherwise. I don't know when it started, but I no longer remember a lot of my primary school years, especially the friends I used to play with in class. By now I've forgotten them.

When did I first feel this way? It was in my first year of working. I went back to my mom's place during a holiday and saw the school uniform my middle school classmates had covered in signatures at graduation. As I looked at the names one by one, a vivid face came to mind for each, until I stopped at one name.

It felt unfamiliar. Who was this? I had no memory of ever having a classmate like that. Only when I dug out the graduation photo and saw the face did I remember who the name belonged to.

If that's how it is with middle school classmates, primary school classmates go without saying. So today, at my grandma's, I turned the place upside down and found my primary school graduation photo.

While I was looking, I was honestly afraid I wouldn't find it, because I felt I'd almost completely forgotten that time, and a photo is one of the few objects that can carry a memory. Luckily, I did find it in the end. I looked at all those childish faces and at the little me in the photo, and I got lost in thought.

First, I didn't recognize most of the people in the photo anymore, and the names weren't printed on the back. So the people whose names I'd forgotten truly became strangers from that moment on, because even my memories of talking to them were gone.

Second, even the few kids I'd been especially close to in primary school, I couldn't remember their names either. I looked at their faces, pointed at one, and said, "I was really close with this kid when I was little, but I don't remember his name."

It's actually pretty cruel. In the big picture, a human life passes like a white colt glimpsed through a crack in the wall, gone in an instant. But from one person's point of view, think how many people you meet in a lifetime, how many you brush past, how many words you say, how many things happen. Every person is a living history book.

And yet we can't remember forever the moments we once thought we'd never forget.

As I get older, I'm slowly realizing how important it is to keep records. In this age of information overload, our memories get mixed up with a mountain of information, and if we don't record them, they get forgotten along with it.

I used to not like taking photos or keeping records. People only realize how important recording is when its value really shows. This primary school graduation photo is the best proof. It's from a time I'd almost completely forgotten, and the photo, as a medium, brought those memories back. It felt like finding a treasure. I felt my life wasn't missing a piece after all.

For someone like me, born after 2000 and raised in the countryside, our childhood clothes still had a bit of the style from the early years of reform and opening up. Our photos went from blurry knockoff-phone shots to sharp smartphone pictures, and growing up, we watched technology get smarter.

Kids today, as people say online, "even have their embarrassing past in 4K." Maybe in their future, their memories won't have that hazy blur of old photos.

In short, starting to record your life as early as possible is something that can't wait.