Being the cheap-skate that I am, I didn’t pay for an
international phone plan for this month in Greece. I’m normally not very
connected to my phone and figured that this would not change outside of the US.
The first few days on Crete I left my phone in my suitcase, tucked under my bed,
as our group traveled around the island. I didn’t have service anyway, so I
thought it more of a burden than an asset. However, I became sad thinking that
I would never see these places again in just the way that I saw them then. That
without photographs, these places would cease to exist in my life. That even if
I did come back, the place would be different. Too different. And I was afraid
of forgetting. For the next few days I brought my serviceless phone with me
everywhere we went. I tried, in vain, to keep images in my phone that would be
powerful enough to bring me back.
At the monastery, I begin to feel a tightness in my chest. A
sadness and a fear that I will not be able to remember this place. I am no stranger
to this feeling – it has tainted many of my memories. I stop and stare for a
while. I notice the way that everything touches each other. How the hills graze
the sky, the trees draw patterns across the expanse, the colors rhythmically mix
and change like a flicker. The picture hums and the mountains seem so close
that I am a part of them. From where I stand I can see a piece of the sea – an electric
blue, an amazing blue. A blue so blue that it isn’t just a color anymore. White
buildings are gathered near the blue, they sit in bunches, they enhance the
landscape in a way that many buildings cannot. And all this time, I know that
someday, maybe sooner than I think, certainly sooner than I wish, those hills
will be a memory. They will continue to change as they live on in my mind,
their colors will fade. I will be distant from them; I will forget the patterns
of the trees. I won’t feel this hum that vibrates through the trees and into my
bones.
I won’t remember these lines that mean something to me now.
I won’t remember the smell of the flowers that line the steps down the
mountain. Now I have endless combinations of words to describe what I see – but
these will be whittled down until the shape of this piece is the only
combination that I have. And if I read this a few months from now, or a few
years, my mind will paint a beautiful, but original, piece of art. It will be
mine, but it will not be true.
We don’t entirely remember places or faces; we don’t remember
white noise or verbatim. But we remember the way that those things, those tiny
details, those that shock or mesmerize, and still those that seem extraneous…we
remember how they make us feel. And we cannot carry them with us, but we can
and do carry those feelings. First names will leave our memory, then detailed
accounts, then shapes, until our memories are just an extension of us. That is
why when I think about the hills, I will think about how I am a part of them – and
that is their gift…our gift.
