I went through photographs of people I'd met and who had passed on and it scares me to think that people as important as, well, individuals, could be shifted from my memory without an effort. In more ways than one, I have also passed through someone's memories and then shifted away into just a vague shadow in the back of that person's mind or even none at all.
It is sad to think that something as important as people can be so easily forgotten. His/her memory discarded as easily as an old photograph kept away at the bottom of a messy shack of papers.
Then that person gets a job, falls in love, finds hate, peace, children, family and dies away. While I live my life as though I had never met that person ever in the past.
It is very sad. I'd hate being forgotten from people's memories to be let alone to live my own life. Maybe I will just be an old photograph erased and replaced, made to gather dust in an unopened cupboard for years.
I shudder at that thought. I wish I can remember and relocate everyone I have met in my life. How beautiful it'd be to see the guy who ran away from school in my primary school, and what he is doing with his life. Or what about the teacher who was so loved and scorned by everyone, who got married to a rich guy and left school? Is she fat now? Does she still have that teacherly look with tinted glass and orange salwar? Or that fellow in college who kept following us around just because he liked a girl from our group? Or what about that girl in my class who drew a comic where she and a guy called Ben got married, who according to her story was a classmate of hers in primary school (haha!)? What music does she listen to? What kind of shoes is she wearing?
I'd love to know all these. I hate to let them pass into oblivion, these little details of their lives. But then I am only human and as much as I hate doing it, I know it is happening to me and with me too. I am being forgotten in someone's memory. And I am slowly forgetting someone tonight.
Ben Ning, Creative Practitioner