Remembering the Past...(Well, bits of it.)

Today, my mum gave me the heads up about a school photo of a couple of friends of mine which had been posted on a media site.  I went along to have a look and recognised my friends instantly.

Actually, I think I recognise my school friends more quickly when I see photos from fifteen years or so ago than I do when I see photos of them taken now.  Clearly, I am guilty of that trick of the mind which freezes people at a certain point in their lives, so that one day, when you look at them and see they have changed, it comes as a shock.

Now, one of these friends is no longer with us.  I may blog about that another day.  Ever since we lost her, I have wanted to write about her, but it has never seemed quite right.

For now, let's focus on the other people in the photograph - the ones I did not recognise at once.  Some of them, I figured out after a few minutes, and the handy tag system confirmed my memories.  They didn't look the way I have them in the scrapbook of my mind, though.  Everyone seems a lot smaller and grainier in those photographs, so maybe that is why.

The rest of the people...now, they are odd.  I went to a fairly large school, with as many people in one year group, I think, as we have sometimes had in the entire Year 7-11 span at the school I teach in (Of course, as this post is perhaps suggesting, I could very well be wrong.  Maybe it just seemed like a heaving mass of humanity.  I did spend more time wanting it to vanish than anything else, so it is not surprising that the school seemed overpopulated to me.)  Even amongst so many people, there weren't so many in one half of the year group (we were split into 'T' and 'W' bands - I think that was it.  Some year groups had other letters, too.) that most of the people in the photograph should have been unknown to me.

But they were.

Even when I hovered over their names and saw who they were, it sparked nothing.  It wasn't just a faint feeling of maybe having heard the name at some point but not being able to recall it on my own.  I have no recall of these people.  I suspect I edited them out of my life as I experienced it.

I find this slightly worrying.  What else have I failed to register as it happened?

My mind does this wiping-the-slate thing sometimes.  At the school I teach at, we have an awards night each December.  We go to the same theater, and I park in the same little car park.  The other year, I left the car park, rounded the corner and...was lost.

Nothing looked familiar.  I felt as though I had stepped through a portal to some strange land, which was entirely disconnected from the world as I knew it.  The night even felt different to the way it had a moment before.  Really, if Mr Tumnus skipped up and started talking about sardines on toast, I would not have been all that surprised.  There was a deep, echoing sense of unreality about it all, like the world of H P Lovecraft had broken through the seams at the bottom of our reality and taken over.

It was only when a colleague walked past and I followed them that I managed to leave that corner.  I would have had no idea which way to turn.  The next year, I knew where to go.  The year before, I had known where to go.  But that one night, it was a slice of blankness.

I have friends who remember nearly everything.  I can't imagine what that is like.  My life is more post-modern, with everything slipping and sliding and formed new patterns.  This is partly why I am so unsure about things.  The bedrock of my life is that there is no bedrock.

We're all just standing on quicksand, claiming it is granite, and we could be sucked under any time.

Of course, if that happens, watching the latest Indiana Jones movie has told me I should not grab hold of the snake.  Now that, I seem to remember.