What We Remember

I was fifteen the night we rang in Y2K.

We were at a family friend’s house, all of us half-convinced the world might actually end at midnight—planes falling out of the sky, the power grid collapsing, whatever the news had been murmuring about leading up to it. Nothing catastrophic happened, obviously. But while we waited to see, we decided to watch Moulin Rouge. The thing is, most of us there were music nerds of one flavor or another; we had band kids, choir kids, musical theater kids, and even some members of the ska punk band from the local high school. So needless to say, we took parts and turned it into a sing-along as the new millennium quietly arrived, and we watched the ball drop on TV without any of the end-of-days drama some were expecting.

I can still feel the specifics of that night in flashes of memory that touch on every sense. I remember the living room. The couch. The dark sky outside. The laughter. The harmonies. The noise makers and hats with their tight elastics and staples digging uncomfortably into the skin behind my ears. And I remember that excited energy we all had as we waited to see what happened when the clock ticked over and we were officially in the year 2000.

I couldn’t tell you what I did the week before that, or the week after. But that night, I remember.

It would be amazing if memory worked how I’d like it to, with something like a card catalog system, and rows of tidy memories on shelves, just waiting to be pulled out when needed/wanted. I could file them all away neatly, evenly, uniformly. Unfortunately, it’s stranger than that. Most of a year can dissolve into a blur, indistinguishable from the years around it, while a single night stays vivid in technicolor with sensory details fully in tact. It’s both frustrating and a little funny how I can’t remember my neurologist’s name from 2020 but I can remember every lyric to Mr. Brightside by The Killers from 2003. And I’ll probably be talking about the hazelnut mousse dish I ate in Florence while I’m finishing a chocolate pudding in my retirement home in 2060.

The moments that get burned in like that tend to share something: novelty. There’s some kind of emotional intensity, or a sense of standing right on the edge of transition or transformation. Psychologists sometimes call the sharpest of these “flashbulb memories”, not because they’re objectively more important than anything else that happened that day/month/year, but because something novel and different (and intense) forms a seemingly permanent impression. Our brains aren’t filing it as data at that point… it’s preserving it more like a photograph or video recording, and somehow, it doesn’t erode the way most memory does. I’m sure there’s an actual scientific explanation for it, and I’d love to learn more!

But I have a whole collection of these, and they’re rarely the moments I would have predicted, at the time, were the ones worth keeping. Very few of them did I have a moment where I consciously thought, “I need to remember this forever!”

For instance, 2004-2005. For many reasons, there are lots of these flashbulb memories I can pull up in an instant from that time. It was a really difficult and tragic year in my life, so there are some big life events that I most definitely remember (heart procedure, ED treatment, NDE, falling in love, the death of my best friend). But oddly, the year itself feels almost blurry, even when other people recall something and bring my attention to it. However, one silly memory that comes immediately to mind highlights the truth that we really can’t predict which ones stick.

I decided I had to learn HTML. Why? Because I needed to customize my Myspace page to autoplay “Ohio is for Lovers” by Hawthorne Heights. I have no idea now why that felt so urgent or important, but I learned HTML. At least, I learned enough to get that song to play, and to add a glitch effect any time anyone hovered over my top 8. It’s silly, though, because getting that embed code to actually work felt like more than a small triumph, even then. And clearly, my memory agreed.

There’s every road trip in my high school and college years, running on nothing but a printed-out MapQuest route, a giant Diet Dr. Pepper, a pack of Marlboro Light 100’s, my CD binder, and whatever vibe had settled in by hour three. We didn’t have a GPS voice correcting our wrong turns, and our phones didn’t connect to the internet the same way they all do now. Sure, some of us paid for connection, but it was limited, expensive, and so patchy it wasn’t worth it. So we just checked the print out, argued amongst ourselves in the car, and maybe got out at the next rest stop or gas station to see if they had any maps or a local who knew how the hell to get us back on track. I can still call up that staticky quality of the radio losing signal somewhere in the middle of nowhere, all of us singing over it anyway until we had no option but to find another station or pop in the next CD.

I vividly remember eating everything off the Taco Bell dollar menu in the car with my best friend, standing through the sunroof, screaming Edwin McCain’s “I’ll Be” into the sky, wind whipping my hair as I used a burrito as a microphone. A KFC drumstick worked well, too. It was just as dangerous and illegal then as it is now, so I’m not advising anyone stand in the sunroof singing into whatever food item you have on hand, but hear me out—those were some of the very best nights of my life. And clearly, it stuck.

None of these moments were objectively significant. Nobody was watching. We didn’t take pictures of everything. And nothing about them changed the trajectory of my life in any meaningful way I could point to on paper. But they’re the ones that stayed, vivid and whole, while entire semesters of “important” things faded away.

I’ve noticed nostalgia sharpening the older I get. I think it’s because so much of who we are gets built in exactly the years those memories come from. Adolescence and young adulthood are arguably the most formative years in terms of actively deciding, moment by moment, who we’re going to be and where we want to fit in the world. Looking back at that specific era is more than sentimental reflection for me at this point, because I think there’s some truth to what they say about a “second adolescence” we go through, especially as a woman in perimenopause.

In many ways, this stage of life I’m in now is a mirror to the one where most of my strongest memories reside. I’m coming into myself again, and making all those same decisions, but with decades of experience—and hopefully, wisdom—to guide what I choose going forward into the next stage. Who was I back then (when I was actively becoming someone), and who am I today (as I decide who I’m becoming now) are inextricably connected. How much of that younger version of myself is still here, underneath everyone I’ve had to become since? And how much of her do I want to bring back to the front, now that we have the benefit of having lived some life?

Maybe that’s the pull of nostalgia. It’s more than just missing a simpler time, or wishing for a do-over, or remembering something fondly just for the sake of it. I think it’s reaching back to touch the exact moment a piece of myself first took shape, to see if it’s still recognizable from here. To feel the way I felt back then, and hold it close even now, because it obviously meant something. To determine whether I can bring it forward in time with me or to accept it’s something that has to stay in the past, as something integral but finished for now.

I don’t think those old selves are souvenirs that must sit quietly on a shelf behind me. They’re still there, structurally. I’m the same person hacking their Myspace page just to bare their soul in the form of a chunk of borrowed code. I’m still the person who trusted a paper map, a soda, and a dream of going somewhere cool. I may not stand in the car, shouting love songs into a chicken leg anymore, but I sure do love her. I’d probably benefit from reconnecting with some of that wild spirit she had, actually. But whatever we make now—all of us—we’re building it out of the same raw material those younger selves were made of.

I’d love to know what memories do this to you. I’m sure you’ve got one that’s stayed whole while everything around it faded. What can you still smell, or taste, or hear, from a moment nobody else would have flagged as important at the time?

I think those are the ones that tell us the most about who we actually are, deep down.

May we all allow ourselves to embrace the nostalgia!