Playing the Memory Game
You probably played it too, as a child. A substantial number of tiles face down, you flip two over to look at the images and try to make a match. The longer you play, the more you start to remember where an image’s twin was, either because you or someone else playing the game already flipped it over. It’s been a long time since I’ve played that specific iteration of the game, but I often find myself playing the grown-up version. Flipping over a memory in my mind to look at it, talk about it, or hold onto it. Flipping it back to face down only to forget where exactly it was, or how to find its twin. Flipping it over again and finding the image has changed ever so slightly.
It’s a tricky game. Memory. An impossible, ephemeral, enigmatic entity. I recently attempted to recall and tell the story of my first-ever trip to British Columbia, which was fraught with travel trauma. My audience was a few close family members and as I tried to recount the story, I found myself at a loss for so many of the details that I spent time later in the evening trying to uncover and flip over as much as I could from the depths of my mind.
The year? Unknown. Somewhere around 2010 I’d guess, based on who I was visiting and who I travelled with. (My sister, who had moved to BC in 2008 and my ex, who I shared a life and home with from 2008-2015.) It is the story of how he and I got stranded in Saskatoon en route to Vancouver, and nearly all the details are lost. What remains are only tiny snapshots and strong feelings compounded into little moments. Tiles that I can flip over with an image that is blurry or completely erased.
Those moments? Crying (ridiculously and embarrassingly) in a Denny’s restaurant over our trip being delayed. Going to the service desk to talk to the flight attendant and demanding to know what sort of compensation we’d be given for being stuck in the Saskatoon airport for 13 hours. Lying with my head on a suitcase. Lying with my head on my man’s shoulder. The tiny size of the Saskatoon airport and lack of anywhere to eat. Finally getting out of Saskatoon and taking a cab in Edmonton in the middle of the night to a comped hotel from Air Canada that was comically far away from the airport. Sleeping for two hours only to get up and back to the airport in time to catch the first flight to Vancouver. Strange neon-lit promotional oil rigs along the highway median on the ride to that mystery hotel. The delight of finally arriving in Vancouver – seeing the mountains and water, breathing air that I believed was actually fresher.
But, how did that happen? What series of events transpired for me to end up crying at a Denny’s? There was something with the plane not having enough fuel. Not exactly an emergency landing, but Saskatoon was never in the itinerary. It was meant to be a layover in Edmonton. There was something about the food needing to be restocked. Definitely an entire saga once we were in Saskatoon about the flight crew having worked the maximum number of hours they were legally allowed to, and that causing a further delay because we needed a whole new flight crew to come in.
I could get in touch with the person who lived that experience with me. He might recall the sequence of events on the flight that ultimately led to a very short and unexpected night in Edmonton. He’d most certainly add more colour and detail to the images I keep flipping over in my mind when I call up the story. There are pieces I’ve most certainly lost that he would bring back, just as much as I would for him.
Even as I flip the tiles over to examine them as closely as I can, other moments come back to me. A young family with small children that we befriended in Saskatoon who were just trying to get home and were exhausted beyond measure. Our cab driver brought us to Denny’s after we asked him to bring us somewhere good to eat and I was slightly appalled by his choice. (My apologies to Denny’s – it’s not their fault I was suffering from hypoglycemia, had jet lag, and just lost a day of my vacation, but I distinctly remember disappointment at ending up there. It calls to mind a not-so-twin tile moment of me being dramatic and crying in my car the time we got a flat tire while driving to Maine, only to be picked up by a scary tow-truck driver in New Hampshire who told us how he “wasn’t sure about this Obama guy”.)
And that’s the weird, magical, intense, dark and light power of memory. It is selective – both consciously and unconsciously – in a way I can’t understand that baffles me to no end. Were we actually flying direct or was the layover in Edmonton part of the plan? Why do these details even matter?
The fact that memory and every story we tell about our lives is something that indefinitely slips away over time without the capacity to stop it is… unsettling. How do we trust our memory? We can’t. We can’t be so sure that things happened the way we think because those memories have dulled with time from what we think we remember, to what we think happened, to what we start to believe happened. The images on the tiles lose some of their colour. They get damaged. Scratched. Faded.
Our memories become false to a certain degree. Glossed over. Shining. Embellished. Maybe we take a Sharpie to the tile to draw back in some of the detail that was lost. I heard (or read) somewhere that memories get recreated and reformulated every time you recount a story. You get a laugh at a certain point so you pile on more detail or story around that particular moment of the narrative without establishing or thinking too much about what actually happened before replacing that truth with the storytelling version. Or maybe it hurts too much to remember the truth of a given moment so your mind makes it fuzzy without you even intending.
It’s an incredible phenomenon that I don’t quite understand. And I often catch myself working hard against it. Asking people around me – do you remember when this happened? Inviting them to recall a moment with me so I can validate what is truth and what is story. Requesting that they flip their twin tile over so we can compare to see if the images match. Or, simply taking great care to recount my own individual stories with as much detail as I can so as to do my memories justice.
It makes me grateful for the moments in my life when I chose to keep a journal and document what was happening. Which in of itself is curious. Why should I be grateful? What does it matter if I can’t recall exactly why I ended up marooned in Saskatoon? Isn’t it enough to remember the feelings of heartache and frustration and irony of travel problems and laugh at what, in retrospect, was a comedy of errors?
Sometime in the past couple of years when I was still in a relationship with my last lover and best friend (I guess I’ve had many big loves in my lifetime), he described this odd sensation that compelled both of us to tell each other stories about our lives in excruciating detail, as though our lives depended on it. I’ve been thinking a lot about why it was so important to us. Maybe because those moments – those tiles – those stories are what combine together to make a life. We are who we are, as the result of a series of moments that were funny, sad, happy, mundane, magical, unreal, special, and and and.
Maybe wanting to remember the details is wanting to remember everything about who we are. Who we were. Where we were. And because we can’t remember it all – unless I start writing in a journal every single day to capture all the moments and stories – then the best we can do, or the best I can do, is to hold onto the memory of how I felt in any given moment. I can’t see the tile clearly but I can feel the shape and mood in my hands. Irrational and childish tears in a chain restaurant. Unfair anger toward an Air Canada employee. Love and calm radiating from my man who was patient when I wasn’t. Unbridled elation when we finally got to our destination.
That’s good enough. I don’t need to play the game so furiously. But, it is a lot of fun. Maybe I’ll just flip one more tile over…
This is an adventure. 
One comment