Who We Choose To Be with Amy Courts
Cameras are amazing. They capture images our minds might otherwise fail to properly retain. In the hands of a particularly gifted eye, what we see can become even more powerful and moving once the real image has faded and the paper replica is printed and framed. We can see what we once saw and somehow, without returning to that place and time, return to that place and time.
Audio and video recorders are the same. We can capture sounds on these little plastic discs and relive a moment just by pushing play. Granted, the moment isn’t quite as sweet or thick or consuming…but it can nevertheless transport us to a place where, with the help of visual and audio triggers, memory can produce a respectable duplicate if not a perfect replica.
But what of touch? What about those little sensations that are as fleeting as a breath and as impossible to capture?
Like the first time a first-time-mom feels that flutter in her belly and knows that’s her baby’s tiny foot?
What of the emotional current humming beneath those moments, bolstering in them this overwhelming, indescribable, yet inescapable power?
Like the pure, Nirvana-esque …bliss… of Being the carrier during that moment in time.
What of those moments?
Because I can look at a photo taken that very same day and experience nothing of the moment. I can hear the very same words, in the exact phrasing and intonation, against the backdrop of the same song on the same radio station, and feel nothing but cheated.
…Like it’s sitting there, teasing me, just beyond my grasp, daring me to try and catch it but knowing I never will.
I feel like I’m clawing for a hold on ghosts of damned memories that can’t ever again find form or substance.
I wish there was a machine on which I could simply push “play” to re-feel all those sensations I didn’t mean to take for granted. Or, no…not that I took for granted; just that I never thought I’d so desperately need to remember.
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