Memories, of Light and Dark.

When I look back at my days, conjuring memories of my youth and the sheer recklessness of it all, it almost feels as though I was remembering the life of a stranger. My days, and by extension, nights back then were always filled with back-breaking laughter with friends who always seemed larger than life. 

“How are you not surrounded by friends these days ?” Asked an old friend, one I haven’t spoken to in years.

“You used to be as comfortable chatting to the person sweeping the streets as the person who owned them. What changed?” she mused.

The answer that was lingering at the tip of my tongue felt too naked for me to share over a phone call. 

I answered In the best way I knew how; by ignoring the truth. Burying it is better than baring it, I thought. 

“I grew up, I guess.”

It’s natural for us to grow up avoiding the hard truths. I suppose, the hard things about truths are that they inevitably expose a part of you that you find difficult to live with. 

We all have our roles. Son, daughter, friend, colleague. Across these different, divergent roles that we play, we elicit memories that are unique to each of them. Maybe you’re a better colleague than you are a daughter? A better son than you are friend?

But why do we do this? As I look through my mind’s eye and remember the days when I was less encumbered by the trappings of adulthood, the memory of who I was is startling. The hard truth, one that I’ve been avoiding for so long, is that I found who I was years ago and as I grew older, chose to forget. 

Then as the days rolled into months and months into years, the person that inhabited my psyche became completely unrecognisable. For almost a decade, I stopped playing music; the one thing that defined me and kept my restless mind at peace. I used to have a studio with musical instruments in my old apartment in Melbourne. A couple of guitars, a mic and a bass for my then-girlfriend (who learnt to play just because she shared my passion) to lounge around during days when the storm was blowing or the cold pierced our bones. We would sit on the floor, cross-legged and made up songs that represented our emotions at the time, the yearning for home or of friends who have come and gone or for the future that was not yet written.

As I sit here writing this, I could almost conjure the smell of the bronze strings on my guitars back in that monochromatic room on the corner of Faraday Street. I could feel the joy and see the smiles on the faces of my friends as we laughed and sang at the top of our lungs to songs that existed only in that room, well 20 years ago now, as though they were happening right in front of my very eyes, at this very moment.

I don’t know what changed me or why I chose to forget what defined me. All I knew was that, the further I moved away from the person that I was, the easier it was for me to accept the newer, older version of me. One that was made of sturdier stuff, built to carry the weight of the world on his back.  But I wasn’t happy. The memories of the past that I buried, while deep, surfaced earlier this year. Maybe it’s because I’ve reached a milestone in my life or maybe it’s because I’m suddenly surrounded by vibrational energies that reminded me of the joys of my youth. Like a boomerang, my soul yearned to return to its truth, no matter how hard I tried to keep my inner voice silent, I could only have done it so for so long. Ultimately, the truth will, prevail.