Archived Memories

Memories! what exactly are these? In simple words, I feel memories are some kind of archived events from the past residing in our heads. Some of these are short and sweet, whereas some are dark and sour. Speaking of the positive side, many of us wanted to travel back and relive some of those moments again as we were not aware of the impact it had until time passed by and them not becoming a part of our present lives. I am not referring to the life events here like your birthday, graduation day, or the day when you got engaged. I am speaking of those events which we had not realized in the past that could be the most beautiful moments in your lives. 

These memories evolve with time in our subconscious minds and start creating wonders without our intervention. These will be projected before us when we come across similar moments in our lives, things, or persons in our present lives, and then, we feel everything was reconstructing around us the same way we experienced in our past. I experienced this several times, but most of the time, I could not co-relate the same with any events from my past, but it looks so true as if I am time traveling and revisiting my past with my own eyes. Have you ever experienced the same?

One thing to note here, our past does not mean it is limited to events where we experience things on our own. It might be a movie scene that got seeded into our brain, a group fight that we are not a part of or a story that got our attention in the past. Whenever we face similar moments in our present lives, our little brain replaces us in the various characters we looked after from the past and projects the same before us. Nice, right? Sometimes revisiting these things make us admire small things in the present and constantly reminds us to be ourselves. The more moments we add now are the best gifts we offer to ourselves, which would reduce the high risk of dwelling on your past by ourselves in the future.

Let me share one of my experiences from my college days. I completed my routine work and was supposed to leave back to my room. The weather was good and a little bit cloudy, so I decided to roam around a while and have a cup of tea. I put my headphones on, wandered around the streets for a while, and reached my favorite tea stall. I ordered my tea and waited for the same standing in front of the tea stall. There is an auto-rickshaw stand beside this stall. It is busy at all times, where the auto drivers were yelling names of different places and were pooling customers. I was standing there and watching people pass by. In between, I got my tea. While I was having it, an auto-rickshaw stopped in front of me. Two people got down from the same. I saw a girl sitting in the corner of the seat with her face covered with a scarf. I could only see her eyes. Those beautiful eyes were from, I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

The driver was waiting there to accumulate more passengers. Meanwhile, I tried to get a clear view of her. To my surprise, she noticed I was looking at her and she stared at me with her big eyes. At this point, I felt my soul escaping my body and looked at the entire scenario from the other side of the auto-rickshaw. The world around me is moving except my body & her. I can see her looking at my body which is me. It felt like a dream where all this had occurred to me before. And all of a sudden, I am back to the present with the loud noise of chai-wale uncle yelling at someone. I tried to look back at her as the auto-rickshaw started moving slowly. I walked a couple of steps forward and looked into the auto-rickshaw. To my surprise, I saw her looking for me too. I smiled at her with joy. But the auto-rickshaw pulled the speed where she, the auto-rickshaw & myself became a part of the busy world.

I went back to the stall, paid the bill, and started walking towards my room with the A.R. Rahman sir songs playing in my headphones. Along the way, I tried to brainstorm all the possible ways where I might have seen her. But I could not figure it out. Later with time, I realized that I might recreate a scene from any of my favorite movies, but this time it’s real but not reel. My little brain acted as a cameraman where it filmed the same and gave me a memory to archive. Even today, whenever I see an auto-rickshaw stand or when I visit the same place, I recollect these memories and smile to myself.