People hold on to things to remember events. From a broken relationship, a girl carries a birthday card; from a book, a reader collects sentences; from a weekend holiday at the Coast, sand and cowry shells. But even without these things, the past catches up, it finds you, unaided. In a scent from the collar of the man sitting next to you in the bus, an old lover comes back to life. In an old song, the regrets of a Friday night. In the sound of a siren, your mother’s funeral. In the colour red, the pain of losing virginity.
Scents and songs and sounds and colors transport you to the tombs of time. They take you back to the past, to time in its death. To a rent you were once unable to pay. To teenage inadequacies. Breaking voices. Wet dreams. Adolescence pimples. And at that moment, you experience the past as if it were alive. Scents and songs and sounds and colors deceive you. They make events of the past feel alive. And when they come to you, they do not do so in form of memories. There is a certain laziness in memories. A memory is without life. Inconsequential. A quick, disinterested look in the past. But this past that comes to you through scents and songs and sounds and colors is alive. Your body is not removed from these experiences. It is a participant and a spectator. You remember the exact emotions of a conversation. You feel it again. You remember the pang in your heart when you read those text messages accidentally. You remember the pitilessness of death, and how it felt when it snatched her away. The bloodless bleeding of the heart. You remember laughter. How once upon, you knew the warmth of unprompted laughter. You are more than a witness to the resurrection of time. When it comes back, it brings with it what it took away in its death.
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