The Memories Within

Musings on past lives.

I wonder how memories can lock themselves within us, beyond now blurry images or fragmented thoughts of what might have been. I mean the memories we can still feel, smell, taste, touch. The sensory encoding of a bygone time, tracing the contours of a life we once knew.

I can still smell the potent mix of jet fuel and harbour air from the tarmac at Kai Tak airport. The balance of the wafting brew varied with the seasons; more dense harbour air in summer, jet fuel in winter. But always the same message: “you’re here now.”

I can still feel the sear of hot marble tiles against the soles of my feet in Sai Kung. I’m no more than 8 years old. The feeling brings the patchy pathway to my minds eye, but I don’t remember it as an image without the sense of standing on it, it is the encoding in my nervous system that brings it to life.

The pool in Cotton Tree. I can taste the chlorine, smell it baked into my skin, feel the damp wood sideboards under my feet. Always running, except for the brief inpatient minute when Mum managed to capture me to lash another layer of suncream on. The pool seems bigger than I know it truthfully to be, but at the time it was an ocean of endless elation and boundless possibility.

I can be in the changing rooms in the Football Club in an instant. Dad’s team. The unforgettable blend of white Tiger Balm, worn leather of over-kicked balls, the sweat from Dad’s goalkeeper gloves, and clatter of steel-capped studs on the concrete changing room floor. Enthralled to it all. The ritual. I felt it if a goal went in, because his position was my position and, at the age of 10, I hated it. Hated losing.

The classrooms in Clearwater Bay. The waft of mixing paints in the arts and crafts room, the rattle of the plastic drawers under our desks, and the coarse feel of the copybooks. I can smell the waxed wooden floor in the assembly hall, the fusion of polish and new. I remember fun, and trouble. But mostly, I remember the view through the classroom window of the hills behind, and daydreaming. Constantly.

I wonder why I burn incense all the time. Then the scent of the incense hanging in the air from the burial ground on Muk Min Shan Road pulls me back. I can see the peeled oranges offered at the graves, the photographs, and scattered paper. But it is the fragrant warmth of the insence that is seared into my olfactory nerves. To this day I find contentment in graveyards.

I wonder how memories can lock themselves within us. I know that the places we once knew do not remember us, yet the places we once knew are always residing in us. In the background, accessible at the slightest emotional cue. Another life in another place can feel as if we’re replaying a life that someone else lived, someone that looks like us, but isn’t quite. If memories were only images, I would wonder what is left of that ‘me’, or whether any of it was of this life. Yet when the images are revived by scent and sound, taste and touch, I know that what these memories capture is woven into me, that there is no ‘me’ without them.

The places we once knew encompass both the physical, four walls, and the emotional space, residing in the soul. Both are fluid, transient. To the four walls, we don’t leave a trace; people come and go. But locked within us are the moments of a life we once had, shaping the moments of the life yet to come.