In our back yard hangs rope swing that my children used to love when they were very small. It’s hung on what used to be a mature cherry tree—that’s now long dead. It’s been—what—maybe five or more years since it died? Actually, it might even be longer than that. It died some time after the divorce, but a long time ago now.
The leafless old tree is still standing there, with the rope swing on it, dangling over the lawn.
In the summer, every time I mow the lawn under the swing, I tell myself that the tree—and the swing—have to come down. With every passing year, the old tree has less structural integrity and is less safe. And even if the tree was still alive, the swing and the branch that holds it are both far too small now for my children anyway—not to mention that teenagers don’t have much use for a rope swing hanging from a tree.
— § —
Over and over again, and often multiple times on weekends, I survey the Steam store and the PlayStation store looking for a “new game to play.”
I comb through page after page of game thumbnails and descriptions. I pass over endless four- and five-star rated titles, titles on sale, games that have reviewed well, games that have been recommended to me. It’s tough to find things that I care enough to play these days.
Sometimes I buy something purely because it’s on sale. I download it, maybe even start it up, and then abandon it after just a few minutes.
I’ve often wondered what it is I’m looking for, but today I’ve just started What Remains of Edith Finch and it makes me realize what’s been common to a lot of the off-the-beaten path games I’ve had enough interest to actually continue to play over the last decade or two.
Like many of the others, it’s a game about remembering, and about the past. Not just any old objective past, not history, but a past. Someone’s past. And the feeling of having had a past and trying to come to terms with it, or even just remember it.
— § —
My main Lightroom catalog has over 300,000 photos in it dating back to 1999, which would seem to indicate that I love photos, and in some sense I do; I love to take them, at least.
I rarely, if ever, look at them though. A strange, unsettled feeling, like a mix of sadness and dread and love all at once, comes over me whenever I try to look at photos from the past, unless it’s the very recent past. I think, at the end of the day, that I struggle to bear it. To look at the past. To confront the fact that it was once the present—a present that is no longer.
I only look when my kids take an interest and want to creep back through images that they’ve never really seen or don’t remember, of what once was—places they once were, parents they once had, clothes they once owned, activities they once engaged in, friends they once played with, and so on.
While they wander through different flavors of fascination as we page through old photos, I repeatedly have the uncanny experience of finding pasts that are still as vivid to me, as I look at the photos, as if they were yesterday—yet that I had completely forgotten had ever been.
That adds a bewildering sense of something like guilt to the sadness and dread and love. Guilt that I’ve completely forgotten about a wonderful moment, or that place, or that person, or that difficult day, until seeing the photo. Guilt that if not for the photo, that important memory would have been lost, and a kind of desperation at the realization that someday, I will no longer be here to look at the photo and have the vivid memory of it once again in response.
Maybe my children were too young when it was taken to have any real memory of it. Maybe there are a thousand other photos, spread out through my hundreds of thousands, that are equally as important as this one—that I will never look at again.
Those pasts, those once-presents, have already been lost. That sense of loss is debilitating to me. It’s like losing family members that you love dearly, but not even knowing who they are. It’s like knowing that you’re failing to save the world, somehow, over and over again, but not even being able to observe it directly.
— § —
I have yet to chop down the old tree, even though I know I should. It’s not just in the summer when I’m mowing that I think about this. Now that I have a dog and I’m outside at all hours for dog breaks, I have the same thought in the winter, too.
“That old tree’s got to come down. Swing, too.”
Today I came inside and once again went to Amazon and eBay looking for prices on cordless chainsaws and pole saws and so on. But once again I didn’t buy anything. I put it off, kicked the can down the road again.
The thing is, I feel guilty. Despite the fact that nobody has been on that swing in years, and that I have two teenage kids who have forgotten that it exists, I also have two little children who swing on it all the time. Who stand on it, holding onto the ropes tightly, and fling themselves back and forth, giggling, all smiles and hair and sunlight through the green branches above them.
They will be devastated if I cut down their tree and their swing. So I can’t bear to—to let them down—or to imagine the looks on their faces if they were to find out that I have vague plans to do such a thing out of some misplaced adult need for adult abstractions like safety or pragmatism.
— § —
The past is everything. It is the repository of all meaning and all happiness.
The growing and increasingly sentimental museum of one’s life in adulthood also—as it turns out—hurts.
Like hell.