The Scrapbook of Our Life

What makes people so unique?

My nerdy friend might say the chromosomes which carry the genes from their parents.

My believer friend might say their destiny.

My skeptical friend might say nothing, we're all the same in essence.

Well, I say it is our memory.

What a weird thing our memory is. You possess none of it when you are born, but starting from that second, it builds up, up to the sky, up to infinity, and knows no boundaries. We forget, we remember. These are actions we take for granted but they are just the final product we see in front of the turning wheels and pumping pistons.

Memory is not one, two or three dimensional. Despite some of the arguments we had in our classes regarding the 4th dimension, I believe memory is not even four dimensional. Maybe ten, twenty. Think about it: sometimes, with a single smell, the smell of fresh baked cookies, with a single sound, the sound of a cuckoo bird, with a single sight, the picture of an apple tree, with a single taste, the sweet-sour taste of a lemonade, memories can come back, flooding your mind, sometimes making it hard to snap back into the real world.

You may suddenly remember your childhood, your first house, with an apple tree in the back yard, the smell of cookies coming from the kitchen on a Sunday afternoon, sipping your lemonade while listening the cuckoo bird sing its song.

Then you remember the people, some of who may not be with you anymore, you remember the good times you had with them, the funny things, the sad things, the things you wish you hadn't said or hadn't done. You wish you could take them back, your eyes water out of nowhere.

Then you remember your regrets and promises, your passions; your dreams of being an astronaut, forgotten as soon as the slaughterhouse of dreams (a.k.a. school) reared its head, shelved high, behind your hobbies you had to give up when you started college.

Then you snap back into reality, with the beep of your phone, calling you back to work, or the hissing of the kettle, summoning you back to earth. The memories slowly creep back into their dusty old shelves, some into their tightly locked boxes, some into a place you put them so that you won't forget them, but the place you forget anyway.

Memory, right? It is creepy, yet beautiful. It makes us who we are, and also connects us all the same. Not everyone may possess the memory of going camping with one's dearest friends, but everyone possesses the memory of the landing on the moon. Without memory, we would be nothing, lost in space, and the life we lived until now would not have a scrapbook of its own.