I’m still wallowing in bed as my girlfriend comes back into the room. She peeks out through the curtains into the grey, miserable… ‘Wow, it’s actually sunny’. ‘What, really?’ I had heard the rumors that the sun might honour us with a visit these days, but people say a lot of things. A newfound energy pours through my veins. I jump out of bed and… No, just kidding, I drag myself out of bed as per usual, maybe a little faster; I am not THAT energized by the weather.
‘Let’s go immediately after breakfast to do that thing we need to do’, my girlfriend suggests. ‘You are coming, right?’ I had forgotten about the Thing. Indeed, the Thing is important and the sun is shining. ‘And what about those other things I have to do?’, boring-responsible-Luuk asks me. ‘Whatever’, shitty-fun-Luuk responds. ‘They are now future-Luuk’s problems.’
I had heard the rumors that the sun might honour us with a visit these days, but people say a lot of things
I enter my room, content and lively, open the curtains to the morning sun and whistle as I start wrestling myself into pants. My eye falls on a post-it stuck to my computer screen. I remember I stuck it there a few days ago when I, drunk, had felt the need to speak to myself of the future. ‘You live like in Memento’, drunk-past-me wrote. I was not sufficiently drunk to forget what I meant.
Memento is a movie about some Leonard with anterograde amnesia. He remembers nothing every time he wakes up and has to orient himself through Polaroid pictures, messages and the countless tattoos he wrote to himself in order to figure out who he is and what is happening. The whole chronology of the film moves backwards, so you remain as puzzled by the plot as poor Leonard is. People die, he tries to solve a murder, etc. etc…
I, in line with this movie, had left this sticky piece of paper to myself with the message that I am like Leonard. Of course, I do remember my name, and the plot of my life so far, more or less, but only when I read this post-it I vaguely remember how euphoric I had felt in my drunken revelry. I notice this more and more often.
It’s somewhat easy to remember facts, but impossible to remember the feelings of different moments in life
It’s somewhat easy to remember facts, but impossible to remember the feelings of different moments in life. I don’t remember what it feels like to be drunk when I am not, lonely when I am not, or summer when it is winter. Meanwhile, I notice that these feelings are the actual backbone of life, the ‘facts’ more of a story, a way of keeping nonsense together.
Some hours later, the sky is cast over, stray raindrops splash into the ditch. The day has turned to ashes, and I languish in my hammock, deprived of joy. I remember that I was very happy just recently, and will be again soon. What did that feel like? How will it feel? How is it to, for example, swim in the river and bake in the sun? I will not pretend to know now; I can only trust it was, and will be, very good and unimaginably different.
Luuk Slegers is a Masters student of Sociology, majoring in International Development. He lives on Droevendaal in Wageningen with his five housemates and likes to start the day with a walk through Bennekom forest.