Sometimes the internet retains memories that the brain has forgotten.
The era of Google Chat came after MSN Messenger fell out of favour, and before smartphones aggressively invaded our lives.
In those days, Gchat was the preferred method of mindless chatter for my generation– middle millennials sandwiched between landlines and iPads.
Those were the times when you log onto Gmail and inevitably a box will pop up. A blinking “heya” can spiral into hours of conversation, and because Google saves everything, those messages are a time capsule of old diary entries.
While searching through my emails for a missing plane ticket, Google presented me with a trove of archived chats.
On 2 May 2014, I had typed: “I just felt like I finally found myself these days, because I’m no longer in college trying to be something I didn’t want.” It sounded like bad quote from a B-list teem movie.
Then I remembered, 2014 was a good year. Undeniably so. My heart tingled with something like nostalgia, and something else like fondness.
***
With the passing of time, we unwittingly categorise life into good years and bad years. With the rose-tinted lens of hindsight, it is too easy to reminisce about the things that had gone right, a good night that turned into a great night , and a feeling of contentment so intense that it doesn’t transcribe onto the page. We remember not events but a myriad of sensations, each more beautiful than the previous. That’s what a good year feels like.
A bad year is a change in the weather, when a memory is so traumatic that it shrouds 365 days in partial darkness.
As I write, my tiny room slowly lit up, as if experiencing its own miniscule sunrise. A weak, grey drizzle had dotted the windows when I arrived, but now light had permeated the space, bringing brightness and…perhaps possibility.
I suppose we forget how changeable weather is. Hail makes way for a rainbow, even over the span of a few minutes. How many such transformations fit into the course of a year? When our worlds and minds are ever-changing, a simple good or bad no longer seemed to fit. Fluid. Perhaps that’s a better descriptor for the years ahead.
***
Returning to that particular intoxicating fondness only a good year could bring, perhaps I no longer needed sun-drenched, just illuminated is enough.
Musings of a Leaf 