So after being on my own for almost a month, I came back to spend the night at my parent's house. They had piled together all the stuff I had left and wanted me to look through it and decide what I wanted to keep and what we should get rid of. At the bottom of the pile lay my old, busted up, piece-of-crap computer that I had through college (that I am also typing on currently).
I was surprised to see it, more surprised that it still had the power cable with it, and even more surprised that it turned on!
The bottom of the laptop feels like it is about to burn holes into my legs from overheating, the fan inside of it sounds like a car engine, and whatever I ask it to do takes 10 minutes to load, but lo and behold it still works.
It was like time travel. As I hear the little song my poor neglected Acer played as it sprung to life, I watched a picture of a vacation I was on years ago spring up on my wallpaper. The programs I liked loaded for me automatically, as if my computer was saying, "Here you go, Kate. I know it's been a long time, but I missed you and I promise everything is as you left it."
Something on my desktop catches my eye. A Word document, whose title only takes a moment for me to place mentally. There's my ex-boyfriend's name, staring me in the face. I open the file, and the memories come rushing back. It was a letter he had written to me about what was wrong in our relationship, what I needed to do to fix things, etc. It brought me right back there. It made me remember who he was and what it was like to be with him, and why I was glad I wasn't anymore. It also made me curious as to what else was hidden in this hard drive of mine.
Nothing else was that interesting, really. An old copy of my resume, all my old music, a few stories I had started writing but never finished, and... my instant messaging logs. I had forgotten completely that my computer used to log them. So of course I sat there and read them all.
It was one of the strangest experiences I've had lately. It felt like spying, even though it's not spying if it's on yourself. I feel like by being here, on this computer, looking through these files, I'm disturbing or interrupting the 16-year old me that still lives here, if that doesn't sound completely mental.
The most unnerving part of it was how much of those conversations I didn't remember. Sure, I remember the people, even some of the things that were said, but the bulk of it was new to me. I knew it was me. It sounded like stuff I would say, but I had no recollection of it.
In reality, that's not that weird. We say and do so many different things it's impossible to retain them all, but I'm not used to being confronted with who I used to be.
In this moment, it makes so much sense to me why we need to live in the now, the right fucking now. Memories aren't like my computer. If I store something in the computer I can leave it there for years, and it will still be there. Our brains don't work like that. Memory is fluid. It is open to interpretation. It's based off your perception, which is totally screwed to begin with.
My right now is not that open to interpretation. I can have confidence in the things I know about this moment, because I am currently experiencing this moment. This moment is the only thing in the world that matters. Life is made up of a series of "this moments" and we can choose to live in them, or we can choose to escape our present moment by distracting ourselves with the "what-ifs" and "if-onlys."
This is it.
This is all you've got.
This moment.
Right now.
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