A million billion years ago at the nicest hotel in a town whose name I can’t remember somewhere in Bolivia.
The room cost like $20 a night. I bought the camera that made this photo a couple days before I got on the plane and it broke halfway through the trip. It was bitter cold and I was underprepared for the weather. I don’t know why they didn’t drain this pool. Shortly after I took this, a huge dust storm rolled through town and we hid inside our tiny room punishing ourselves with a Hannah Montana movie because it was the only thing we could find in English.
My memory works off of visual cues from photos. I don’t remember people so well, places I’ve been, things I ate, just photos of them that I took or looked at. I don’t know if this is some kind of learned response from reflexively taking pictures for more than a decade or if my brain is a little broken.
The downside is that all the gone people are flat laid in my mind’s eye. One dimensional fractions of seconds instead of flesh and blood and movement and sound. I guess it’s better than nothing but it feels a little sad and a little empty. I guess I’m glad I’ve got memories at all.
Does your brain work this way? What does a memory feel like to you? What does it look like?
