They seem to exist nowhere but in my imagination, because I cannot seem to tag them to any specific existent places (though some are associated with certain regions, e.g. I have this recurring image of an unfamiliar school, with a quarter-circle foyer and always in still, windless late-afternoon colours, being associated with the area around Keppel). Yet I'm compelled to believe that they are not from dreams because they are too vivid, and because I associate them with certain other very realistic things (such as coming home from my own school for the abovementioned location).
I may have imagined them, I may have--but the odd thing is that fading of memory does not change them the way imagined places change when I do not touch them for years. These remain constantly the same, and every time I chance upon them again, they become as vivid as I remember they were in earlier years.
I'm not quite sure where these are, but it's interesting to think upon. Are they pieces of memories, the rest of which are lost? Do they come from places I've forgotten existed; are they perhaps from movies, photographs, fictions that grew strangely real in my mind?
There is a similar class of memories that hangs about in my brain: these are of places I've only visited once, or perhaps have not visited in more than a decade. I know where these places are, but the impressions have grown so faint I can no longer be sure of exact layouts, only certain colours and tinges in the air.
I wonder if the residue will thicken with age. More memories wandering?
Some have been with me since the times when I had a single-digit age. Sometimes remembering them makes me remember other times when I similarly recalled them. Smatterings of memory that mingle and mix at the edges, like paints on palettes, rather than staying divided and divisible.
As I realise, memories are not film-reels the way modern media portrays them, but singular flashes of sensory input, or moments that loop to create a scene whose details are unimportant.
It all comes together, and there is no actual process to the scene that forms the memory: flowers fall and the breeze is cold; there is a faint scent of roasting chestnuts from the road behind, children in the periphery. You see grey pavement and know the tingle of the skin that comes from a pretty wind, yet you do not automatically picture the entire walk from the city edge to the temple you meant to visit.
That is perhaps why I have no idea what these little satellites of sensory information are--making rounds in my memory, detached from the events that spawned them, without destination or purpose. Like transposons, those pieces of genetic information without any certain purpose to the organism as a whole, but which persist and are conserved in the genome anyway merely because they are able to survive.
These memories deluge me sometimes. I went for the RACO concert and the very final piece, which was veritably of cosmic scale, brought long chains of recollections of places, some seeming fantastical though somehow I am certain I have visited them before. Perhaps in fiction, again.
Ah, the strangeness of the human mind. How did evolution produce such a confounding entity?
