shelves of memories

..Places are places and memories are memories and life is fucking life…

—The Midnight Library

I’ve always imagined that our mind is like an endless drawer, filled up with things after things. I’d go cleaned up my drawers and put the less important on the bottom, while sorting the others on the top.

Since I read the novel who’s quote on the top of this writing, I had this ideas of a library on my mind. The memory isn’t stack inside the drawer, but rather, shaped as a book that you can open. It’s similar with one movie I’ve watched when the protagonist open a sequence of time shaped like a picture.

And those drawers, those books, even though I have many, I never forgot because I’m the one who put the things there.

From the smells of warm toasted bread in the morning, to the breeze of the shore. The colours of midnight, the loudness of a street, the mundane feelings of a 2 pm lecture.  They’re arranged in shelves, with their name on the cover of it.

Perhaps, it was the reasons why we never forgot. You changed place, you changed your situation, even you changed yourself. But memories don’t. It will be a stagnant things on the corner of your mind, placed on the furthest shelves you decided to forget it so hard, you ended up remembering them again.

Those books lingers on your mind longer than the others. The ink are still black as night, the smell of freshly printed papers, the colours are still bright as ever. There’s always options to put them on the back, but if they’re always fresh and new, then why would you?

After all, they are what made us who we are. Maybe that’s what all lives were, though. And there, in the remembrance of loving, laid our greatest book of all, the one where we’ll look up to if things weren’t enough.

I hope you already know your warm embrace of a memory. I do hope the same for me.

Read also: Finding Balance