To me, my memory of March 2018 sounds like the sizzling of my mother’s cooking in the room over, my fingers rested upon the calloused wooden table as I sat down, waiting after setting up the table. March of 2018 smells like the wildflowers and fresh soil beneath my feet after playing freeze tag at the park. I remember the feeling of the breeze on my skin and the metallic monkey bars in my hands.
I’m sure each of us carries certain moments that briefly pull us back and leave us with an unidentifiable ache.
A few days ago, I was walking between classes when I was struck with this ache of recognition. I learned in Intro Psych that vision is our dominant sense; it plays the biggest part in our perception, what we believe is true about the world. What I saw before me was the Hopkins campus, but the temperature of the air, the slight breeze, the sun above me — something about it reminded me of places now only present in my past. Not of a single memory, but that place inside the fog of my mind where all my thoughts mix together. The fog is thick, and I am without a light — finding that one area becomes hard, slipping farther out of reach the more I think about it. I resign myself to attempts of ignoring the feeling instead, but its presence baits me.
I could feel my arms swinging at my sides, my backpack pressed against me, yet all these sensations were dulled. I felt the urge to stop and touch something, do anything to confirm this was indeed my reality. These other feelings seemed unimportant compared to the familiar tinge I was struggling to grasp. I gave in and tried again to identify it, but the feeling flitted up higher and higher, bouncing unpredictably in the air like a blown bubble until it popped and disappeared. Maybe I should’ve stopped searching in my head, especially since I could feel it in the back of my throat — a burning sensation that crept down and settled atop my diaphragm.
Sometimes, when I sit at the Breezeway and stare down the quad at Shriver Hall, I imagine if gravity flipped and the clouds became platforms we could sit on to observe the void below us. We’d stare up at the buildings attached to the ground (now the sky), and wonder when they’d collapse into the abyss. In this upside-down world, everything is temporary. Gravity eventually consumes each and every object we try to keep permanent. All I can do is sit on my cloud and watch it happen.
It all seems so temporary. Everything will eventually become memories, spontaneous glows of feeling that we’ll longingly try to capture, before they fade away into the depths of our mind again. I wonder if the same could be said of our pasts. When the wind blows a particular way, I’m sucked into the emotions of a time that doesn’t exist anymore, with no way to live it again. It seems to me that I can so easily remember what periods of the past have felt like, but truly stepping back into those moments and experiencing more than a few stabs of warmth is almost impossible.
No matter how tightly I hold on, the present I see ends up hurling away, shrinking into a tinier and tinier speck until I can’t tell it apart from the stars at night. Sitting on the bench at the Breezeway one night, I imagine again that I’m in the upside-down world. Looking over the top of Shriver at the condos behind it, I can stare up and take in the view — though this is my current reality, I know that this scene, too, will fall into the sky. Maybe I’ll stumble upon this realization again in a few years. That’s when I’ll look down again and appreciate the ever-expanding starry night below.
Jerry Hong is a freshman from Toronto, Canada studying Public Health.
