Memories are the best thing you'll ever have
Do the facts even matter?
Hi there! I’m Karen, and here at On the Outside I write about navigating life with my compass of curiosity, courage and connection, going via adventure and healing. I live amongst the south Welsh mountains, with a hoard of books, a garden full of foxgloves and goldfinches, drinking tea. Basically, a hobbit. Wandering, not lost.
Subscribe to join me on this journey through the truth and beauty of the uncertain and the unknown. With tea.
The song…
All quotes from this piece are taken from this song, Old Pine by Ben Howard.
I remember that day so clearly, the wall, the bone. I walked along the small brick wall, following my brother, in the middle of the town. He fell, his skin splitting open. I saw the bone before our mum held his flesh together while someone ran for help. I remember walking on the wall.
My brother and my mum also remember the day. I never left my pushchair. I was only 3, I had no business walking on a brick wall. I probably didn’t even see the bone. But I remember it.
Where the ocean stood, down dust and pine cone tracks.
What do we do with our memories? Often, we’ll try to trap them, capturing them in words or photos, to store them on the dusty shelves of our mind’s library, in metaphorical notebooks with creaking spines, crumbling pages, flaking, changing and bending with time.
Perhaps these things help so we can ‘fact-check’. Did we really see that person at that beach? Did that dish at that restaurant have the chips with it, or the salad? We reach for phones, our external memory repository, we flick back through years of living, good times and bad, past screenshots I can’t remember taking, flitting over those embarrassing photos. Thinking to myself, I really must print some of these out.
There’ll be that one photo that catches my eye. The notebook falling off the shelf. Look at me. Remember me. Let’s go on a journey. I remember the day, the fun, the place, the people. The joy floods into my heart, up to my face, and I’ve travelled through time to that moment.
The question isn’t what do we do, but why do we do it? It’s the meaning in our hearts.
I saw the painting and was transported. Maybe to the time, maybe to the place. Mostly, to the emotion.
A young lady, blindfolded, is being gently pushed down onto the executioner’s block, the perpetrator of said execution standing blithely off to one side. Opposite, two ladies in waiting, dressed in finery and pearls, wail their anguish to the stone walls. The young lady is Lady Jane Grey, the Nine-Days Queen. The painter was Paul Delaroche.
It captured me, and holds me captive, entranced, each time I visit the gallery. The sheer size of the painting is impressive, but I like to get close. I remember the gentle shine on the pearls, the way Lady Jane’s hair seemed as delicate as the straw spread on the floor to catch her blood. I remember the fingernails of her hand stretching out to catch herself as she is pushed.
I feel the distress, the fear, the terror at the inevitable. I move through it each time I see the painting. Mingled and woven throughout is a feeling of awe. How a painter 300 years after the event could capture something so perfectly. How it speaks to me every time I see it.
I question, then, does it matter if the thing is perfectly truthful, if the emotions are real? Isn’t that art?
There are some moments when you know in your heart that you will never be here again.
Does that knowledge make that moment more precious? How do we choose to react? Or is that knowledge the thing that takes us out of the present, so we stop fully enjoying the moment and instead wonder how we’ll ever remember it properly?
After my Dad’s funeral, I sat down to write out every detail. I wanted to never forget what had happened. To know I had a book on a shelf that I could take down and recall the precise facts of a dark time in life.
In 7 years, I’ve read it probably once.
Do the facts matter, when I remember and feel the emotions so well?
P.S. Are we ever truly in the same place twice? The place might not change, but we do.
The single guitar starts, Mum turns the speakers up, and we’re both somewhere other than the car.
“This song makes me feel happy,” she said. I agreed. Even though it was played at my Dad’s funeral, somehow it makes me happy. The refrain starts and the connection with Dad solidifies from ever-present smoke barely seen in the sunshine, to a shining rope, twisting but firm.
We drive on.
We stood
Steady as the stars in the woods
So happy-hearted
And the warmth rang true inside these bones
As the old pine fell we sang
Just to bless the morning
“He’s definitely talking about an experience, isn’t he?” says Mum. Memories. Trying to capture moments and keep them, knowing full well that we can’t, not entirely. It doesn’t matter what sort of pine tree it was, or what season it was; these are the what. These can be caught and captured easily, but forgotten just as swiftly.
That feeling, of standing in the pine forest, happy and feeling blessed, that is harder to adequately capture, but far, far harder to forget.
A song played at death transports me to the joy, the happy-heartedness of life.
I’ve come to know that memories were the best things you ever had. - Old Pine, Ben Howard.
I stop trying to photograph every little thing. I stop trying to gather all the tiny facts of life, and instead try to gather the memories, the emotions, the meaning and the why.
I try to write the story.
How do you capture your story?
K x
Or, you can tip me here.
This is part of Claire Venus’ Sparkle on Substack Essay Club. This is essay 11/24. Go here to read more about it!
This is beautiful Karen 😊 Thank you ❤️
What a beautiful piece of writing! Thank you, Karen.