Fading Memories…

In the not so distant past my friends used to envy my ability to remember things, I was truly proud of my memory skills. In recent years I do not feel the same, it is getting harder to remember things from the past, I’ve even forgotten the names of some of the people I studied with for years, people I worked with and had fun. The most terrifying thing is that I do not remember how I felt about everyday things in the past. I feel I have no connection at all with myself 10 or even 5 years ago. In the pictures I look the same but what is in my head appears to have completely changed. I have lost contact with most people from the past, most people that surround me I met the last few years. I still do not know whether that was intentional.

Last week I was talking to a friend I have known for many years, his attitude, his way of thinking appears to have changed very little the last 10 years. I cannot say the same about the rest of my friends, most have matured beyond recognition. The things we did in the past are now distant memories, we only remember the craziest things, the most embarrassing moments, accidents and disasters. I personally hardly remember the satisfaction from my achievements. People ask me how I felt living abroad for so many years; it is becoming more and more difficult to describe it, especially when I talk about how it was in the nineties. I look back at the missed opportunities and I do not remember how I messed things up, what made me weak, did I ever learn any lessons from them, did I become a better man?

People say I am still young, the future is ahead of me, yet what is the future worth if you cannot remember your past. Nowadays I look around me, I see people much younger than me, with more opportunities and energy. They have no fear for the future, I remember having that feeling when I was a student; I felt that the world was mine. Now that feeling like many other pleasant ones is a distant memory. Pragmatism has “crashed” most of my wild dreams and has changed my character. Some times I still behave like an immature teenager; I only do it in a fatal attempt to grasp that feeling from the past.

How things change!