Have you ever just been thrumming along about your day and then, with no warning, no obvious trigger, your head fills with the memory of an image from your past? A random thought, unrelated to anything you're doing at the moment, just pops in, and suddenly you're all nostalgic, or angry, or embarrassed about something that you saw or that happened to you years ago?
For me it's mostly places. I'll be talking to someone at the office, pause for a breath, and POW! suddenly I'm recalling an intersection in Lautzenhausen, the small German village that was attached to Hahn Air Base where our unit was billeted when I was there in 1986-'87. Or I'll suddenly recall the entire route I drove from an apartment I had somewhere, to the place I worked at the time. Or the layout of a room in a building at college.
I can't sit here and conjure up these things. I mean, I can, but it's not the same as when they pop up randomly.
It's really weird when it's a thought or a memory that I haven't recalled in decades, like a vision from my childhood, even remembering things from the perspective of a four-foot-tall eight-year-old.
Don't you just hate it when you sit down to write something, but nothing relevant comes to mind?
dassall!
3 comments:
Sure Farrago. There is a medical term for your situation. It's called Acid Flashback.
It actually happens to me quite a bit. It's like finding money pressed between the pages of an old book. Wonderful, even if the memory is a bad one.
Everytime I smell a pack of crayons, I'm instantly transported back in time to Mrs. Fleming's first grade class, wearing my brand new clothes and sitting at a desk just for me. When I hear that "chain gang" song from The Pretenders, I immediately time travel to Framingham State College, where I went back to school after taking several years off from academia.
I'm having that feeling right now....What did I want to say again???
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