Everyone has experienced this feeling one time or another, you hear a song, a voice, smell something, or see something that immediately brings you back to the time and place where that something occurred. For instance, you hear a song from the nineties and you can instantly remember that middle school dance and the exact poofy Cinderella dress you had to have on. In your head you have the exact picture, almost as if you were floating outside your body up above the dance floor looking down, witnessing it all. So we can trace the days back to the nineties, but we can’t remember right from wrong, or a simple answer to a science test question, or even directions to your distant relatives house that you’ve only visited once before. I suppose that would be another lesson in Psychology that I blurred out, but coming from a personal view, those memories and visions that are triggered can be extremely sentimental.
Music is one of my extensive memory triggers. It serves as an emotionally rich stimulus for the brain. I’m driving in the car and a random throwback comes on and then it happens.. the road is there but there are no sounds, the sky remains above but no trace of birds, and my sight freezes before me while my insides relive what has once happened before. The group of friends I was with, how late at night it was, who was driving the car that we were in…wherever we were off to. Soon its over, my body is back with my mind and together they return to my drive. Everything goes back to normal. Or was it even normal to begin with?
These clips remind me of That’s So Raven!, that Disney channel show with Raven Symone, where she frequently encounters ‘visions’ because she can see the future. Very childish I know, but when I picture myself during these happenings, I find the show’s plot to be very similar.
When it comes to smells, the memories that I have come across have usually been involved with blueberry objects. As if I smell a flavored chapstick that’s blueberry, I’m suddenly reminded of a time where I enjoyed a blueberry slush puppy; simple enough. Easy enough to explain with any other of the four senses.
Every day continues on whether or not you agree with the speed of time. You wish those memories came back to you. You wish you could go back to that middle school dance or that car ride with your friends and continue on with a life that turned around. I’m sorry, but if that was meant to be, then the hour’s rapid numbers wouldn’t be increasing as I typed the rest of this sentence. Time was meant to move forward, and memories were given that title for a reason. We all contain mental impressions of past times that we wish to return to, whether it be yesterday or seven years ago. And somewhere out there in the land of clockwise rotations, is an explanation for it all.. Because I know that a forthcoming moment holds positivity for everyone. No matter if its believable or not, it can and will happen. That something better can fill in the forgotten minutes that slipped away between those triggered memories.
“I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise