Flashes of Life

I can still remember the moment I bit through the bubbly, fried rectangular pie; gooey-hot apple chunks flooding into my mouth. And how the suddenly rattling windows herded us first under the desks and then outside to the field after the big earthquake, where we stood laughing in the sunlight, thrilled to miss class.

I remember the way my grandmother’s hair smelled of the wood fires she cooked meals over in the village, silver waves beginning to stream into the dark, and how she fed me with garlic-tipped fingers. Or the time I decided to run away from home and sat on a curb waiting for Amiji to notice, sweat trickling down my neck until I was too thirsty to stand it anymore and ran inside, breathless, sure she’d be frantic with worry because I’d been away so very long.

Had I managed to stay out longer than 15 minutes, she very well might have been.

My childhood memories are so vivid that when I close my eyes, I taste them. Those years are filled with original memories, the “firsts”, with time stretching out to accommodate a rapidly learning mind. But, at some point, the learning declines, a fruit has already been tasted so many times that it barely registers, and memories become less palpable, less differentiated, so dim that they may no longer even be mine.

We lose our days unless we make a conscious effort to live them.

Too often these days, my husband and I return from a day at the office spent glued to a computer screen, and then spend the evening sitting in the same room still connected to our respective computers instead of to each other. Everyone I know is plugged into the TV, radio, Blackberry, laptop, iPod, text-filled cell phone, or video game du jour for much of each day, monkey minds swinging from thought to thought just like links clicked from web page to web page until one ends up in an unexpected place with no memory of how one arrived there or why.

What happens to memory when one day spent in front of a computer blends into another – does it become as soft and indistinguishable as jelly? If each day will only return to us on the Day of Judgment, I wonder how many I’ll actually recognize enough to claim as my own.

If life flashes before our eyes when we die, what will I see? Will I remember the light on the windowsill today, the fresh *pop* of tomatoes in my mouth, the feel of your limbs under mine? Will I recall reciting a sonnet, inhaling a baby’s scent, kissing your dear, departed fingertips? Will I relive praying under the trees, promising You to make each day sacred, conscious and unique?

Or, will my childhood scenes morph into celluloid montages, celebrity trivia, and thousands upon thousands of web pages browsed, the roil of information sweeping out any original memories in my mind?

Whose life, finally, will flash before these eyes – mine, or Britney’s?