slideshow memory theater

27 May, 2024

last weekend i went to see a movie with some friends from high school and one of them pulled me aside to be like: "do you remember one of the first times we spoke? it was in the wing where they always made us line up for assembly and you were asking me if the art for this series got better over time."


i didn't. this must have been close to eight years ago.

another friend, who first introduced me to haikyuu!!, quickly chimed in with a "no, she asked me the exact same thing in history club. right before we watched magic mike xxl." that last bit could have been a joke, though it probably isn't. regardless, i didn't really remember it either. sophomore year was surprisingly busy for me, so i imagine i must have spent the rest of that period catching up on sleep.

days later and thinking about this has made me feel all gooey on the inside. like the frame of an old sliding door. like the inside of a freshly-baked cookie or the box you kicked under your bed the summer of 2009 and never opened again. how many of my memories do other people keep?

i've talked a bit about how i'm quick to pick myself up; a large part of this can be attributed to the fact that the more present i am in a moment the easier it is to let that moment go. whether it be painful, embarrassing, transformative, or just plain good, my brain is usually satisfied to forget once it decides i've wrung as much out of it as i can. for this reason, in-betweens are more vivid to me than anything else. in a way, i'm still living them.

but what are in-betweens, anyway? a convenient means for me to explain why i come across so reserved, mostly. you know, because nothing i retain ever feels like that big of a deal. i realize how ridiculous and unnecessarily self-deprecating this sounds. still, old habits die hard — which is why we cultivate new ones like taking pictures, or blogging, or screaming some of our clearest recollections into the void:

(i.)
do you remember coming back from saitama? it was six degrees out and we were debating yakiniku for dinner because we'd talked about going for it before the show. we must have gotten stopped by every single stoplight in shinjuku but i couldn't feel the cold at all. the only thing nipping at my fingers was adrenaline, bright and fizzy.

the beef bowl place we settled on was further than expected, tucked in an alley a few minutes from our hotel. when you started walking faster to avoid the drunken crowd it set something off in my gut; knocking our shoulders together was my only means of keeping up. i was still high off the stadium lights and indoor disinfectant and the lone five hundred yen coin burning a hole in my pocket. can you blame me for laughing? everyone giggling and stumbling out onto the street looked just like me.

(ii.)
do you remember the dance floor? i know i'm over you and all but i can't seem to shut up about it. we never danced. we weren't the dancing type then— at least, not me. not in public. not with you. but the dance floor they pulled out and taped to the tiles was so stupid. i almost tripped over it that night when you looked at me because i could tell.

we'd always been ferrymen at core, and a crisis of emotion happening close to the bar was par for the course. needless to say, it wasn't ours. i was exhausted. debut season felt like heels today and tomorrow and the day after that. keepers to call, friends to watch over, servers to apologize to for their monopoly of bathroom stalls. when you flagged me down to say you'd hold down the hotel lobby, the air around your drink had condensed into tiny beads of water. i'd assumed you were leaving. i hated being around you; i was so relieved you were staying.

i never asked you to dance and thank god for that. i could tell if i had, we'd have laughed ourselves silly. upturned every rule made golden. made a mess of the epoxy. and then what. and then what?

(iii.)
do you remember the parties you'd throw me in the cafeteria? if there weren't balloons taped to the back of my seat before homeroom, i'd find one of you hiding an air pump beneath your desk. i'd come down for lunch with half of you suspiciously missing from our usual table and the rest talking animatedly about something clearly made up. twenty minutes later you’d turn up with a monstrosity christened cake made of ice cream sandwiches, cheap confectionery, and as many wafer sticks as the structure could take.

by the grace of the gregorian calendar, we always had school on my birthday. i used to hate getting fussed over, but like this was okay. whenever i mentioned disliking candy somebody would say something along the lines of well, we knew that, but i was craving gummy worms today. more than anything else, it was the open ease with which you could be cheeky that was worth celebrating.