The remnants of a future that almost was:
What is a memento?
A few months ago, I returned to my hometown for the Christmas holidays. My current house in Italy used to belong to my grandmother. I spent my childhood and teenage years there. To me, it was the safest place in the world. Now, it is a source of heart-wrenching grief and misery.
The house brims with memories of my grandma and my mother, who both passed away in 2018. Throughout the past five years, every return to my birthplace has been an emotional rollercoaster. I only recently learned to bury some of my most self-destructive feelings deep within those corners of my mind that I seldom have access to. However, I still occasionally fail and let some of them sneak out. Especially when digging through old belongings in search of my family’s artefacts. Who knows how many stories lurk behind the walls of that ancient household?
Still, I should find a new hobby. These are the sort of memory catalysts that plague me day and night.
Anyway, the past Christmas, I found a letter, some consumed pictures, and my mother’s elementary school cards.
The letter was from my grandmother to her daughter. I suppose texting was never her speciality; she was born in 1927! Besides, considering the message’s nature, it wasn’t the type of conversation she would be pleased to have on an open field. She has always been too sensitive for confrontations, too likely to end up in tears, unable to illustrate her point.
The letter still carried her brittle fragrance, and I immediately recognised that proper and tiny handwriting I was always so envious of. As I read once clandestine words, I saw her and my mother materialise before my astonished gaze. My grandma’s voice throughout the text was clear and discernible, as the recipient’s distinct personality emerged word after word. Both of them were arguing in the same living room I was in. I could see my grandma’s desperate yet resolute gaze while she attempted to voice her discomfort, pondering every word she used while silently pleading with her. And my mum, listening to the note as she absorbed the weight of words too emotionally charged to be spoken out loud. It was as if a snapshot of a moment frozen in time had come alive through the handwritten script.
The problem is every letter has a “Dear…” and “Love…”. They end. And I hate it. That note granted me access to a past I never experienced but was bound to me through its protagonists’ lives. I was back in a time when all of us still lived together, lost in too-fragile happiness for our mortal nature.
And just as the written message ended, my mother and grandma dissolved before my tear-filled eyes.
I tried to hold on to them and grab their hands as I launched myself forward, but it was too late. The words had been spoken, and it didn’t matter how many times I reread them; they were now part of a past buried with my beloved.
As I lay on the floor surrounded by pictures whose worlds were long gone, I opened my mother’s elementary school card.
I read the report describing her as a shy, quiet child, a person thousand years distant from the reserved yet dazzling woman I used to know. She had a life before me, an existence where she could be the main character of her own story as a kid, a teenager, and a young woman. There was a time when she worried over meaningless grades, and she came back home drunk on shellfish and red wine and could stay all night out, free from responsibilities that would later burden her everywhere.
I searched through the pictures and finally saw my favourite, dark hair framing her classically mischievous expression as she teasingly mocked a statue. Her face was young and careless. Where was I then?
As I continued my distressed search, I finally found my three-year-old self framed in the picture of a memory I never lost. Scientists say you can’t remember much before a certain age, but I beg to differ.
And I am there once again, on a Sardinia beach; I am so small, and behind, I feel my mother’s arms holding me tight, looking away into the sea,
“Please look at me- please, mum.”
But she couldn’t.
In the picture, she only gazes afar, but it’s okay because I still felt the comfort of her hands on my tiny shoulders, and her patchouli aroma filled my nose with a joy I had not touched in years.
But the past is gone, and I can only steal moments. I was fortunate enough to have frozen behind old pictures and written words.
I was trapped forever in a photo; what could I do? It was my memento and my chance to go back.
As I try to move and hold her tighter,
I was back once again in that living room of death.
I wonder how many more of these hit-and-run visits to the past I will have to survive and how many more times I will be forced to whisper farewell.
Are these objects here to torment me, to lure me into delusions of happiness that will not last?
I spent that day contemplating what to do with those artefacts, those remnants of death, a magnet for grief. As much as they were an occasional source of pain, they also were my attachment to a past I could never bring myself to leave behind. And even if I chose to reduce them to ashes of haunting regrets, I would still return in a few months to find other hidden artefacts to cry over.
It was absurd how intensely I could still smell my mother’s patchouli. Then I suddenly remembered. I rushed to the bathroom and hysterically rummaged through the wooden cabinet, still harbouring most of my mum’s and grandma’s beauty items. As I sprayed my mother’s soft perfume all over me and painted my lips with my grandma’s Chanel rouge, no illusions threw me back into a time currently lost; That same past was now enveloping my present. And I stood before the mirror, looking at the reflection of the true memento haunting that house: me.
