Memories

Have you realised how fast and fleeting our time as students have passed? If you haven’t, perhaps it is time to make that revelation. Recently, conversations have often been drawn to the topic of the impending end of our term; it’s as if, on a subconscious basis, increasing number of my peers have come to realise that very soon we will be ripped from the net of security and safety that we have been residing and depending on for years, only to be thrown into the chaotic, unpredictable and painful reality that we have been sheltered and insulated from. And it will be a great leap for many of us, having to experience the abrupt transition from a study-centric environment to a mercantile and, as such, often merciless world, as we join thousands others in the never-ending treadmill of work and subscribe to the tiresome but necessary rat race.

As we embark on a new journey in our individual lives, I often wonder what will happen to the treasured memories of this era. The invaluable friendships, the shared experiences and the sweet memories. Will they be volatile, evaporating away as new chemicals and solvents are introduced into our lives, reducing what used to be solid and tangible into something less significant – liquid perhaps, with its once marked contours liquefying into a solution no longer defined, no longer tangible? Or gaseous instead, where there is little or nothing left holding on to the bonds of the past, allowing these molecules of memories to skitter off, never to be seen again? Will they be displaced by new feelings as time alters the composition of our thoughts and emotions, relegating those that were once cherished to the bottom of the mixture, buried, replaced and forgotten? These doubts and uncertainties, they coalesce into one simple question: just what are memories made of?

And I find no answer.