Up North

"I'll be the one who'll break my heart"

In clinical pychology they teach you that individuals who suffer from depression can lighten their mood by remembering happy episodes in their lives.
This strategy might work well as a short-term method in critical situations, but I would advise caution in the long-term use of the drug. Because a drug it is, this memory of a "happy and blissful past"- Sipping from the melancholy mix of nostalgia might relieve the feeling of hopelessness that is weighing you down, but it guides your focus away from the present (not to mention the future). And it is today and tomorrow and the day after that that you need to look towards!
Now, I am far from suffering from depression (thank God, or rather, my genetics+environment cocktail), but I have become a sucker for memories, too. For a good deal of the week, in all the little moments where I'm alone, especially when procrastinating some studying or the other, I let myself slip back into memories of my Year in Canada. Don't get me wrong, I have a life here in Leipzig, and it isn't even a dull life or a loney life.
And yet...let me illustrate what I mean by my still pending repatriation:
While I'm writing this it is dark outside, after 10pm. Yet my laptop clock shows faithfully 4:20pm, Montréal time. If I had still access to my McGill website I'd probably check the weather forecast every once in a while. Before Christmas I youtubed "Montréal in the snow" and promptly followed a guy through last year's snowy Montréal, thinking that I was probably there, in another side street, fighting to get through the masses of snow.
And of course, I keep track of what I was doing lastyearatthistime. Right now, lastyearatthistime has me coming back from Christmas in Germany, exhausted from a long flight and a longer bus ride from New York Central Station to Montréal. Only because I was too scared to get on another plane from NYC :)
So I don't think I'm exaggerating when I claim to be thinking of my Year in Canada every day. And these memories aren't even mediated by anything, they just pop up any time during the day. Others are activated by stimuli of the sensory perception: mostly auditive, but sometimes olfactory/gustatory sensations. As the avid reader of this journal will know, I dabbled quite a bit in cooking last year, and so the taste of a vegetable curry or the smell of a ratatouille fabricated in my Leipzig kitchen will inevitably evoke the squeaky floorboards of this other kitchen, in which I've spent so much time cooking, but also dancing (space!), singing, and talking whole nights through.
Apart from sound, the faculty of smell has the strongest capacity of bringing back memories, not so much of objects or events, but of atmospheres, of the whole repertoire of emotions and thoughts that possessed you at the time of smelling. I think that's because of a direct link between the olfactory nerves and the amygdala, a region in the brain responsible for emotions and the emotional part of memories. Remember those holidays at the Baltic Sea when you were, say, 16? Now imagine you're buying sunscreen for your next summer vacation and testing for its scent. Out of the blue, you are hit by images of a blue sky, the sea, the book you were reading then and the guy you had a crush on (diving instructor, volleyball partner, bungalow neighbour, younamehim). That's how strong the ties are that link your nose with your past.
So why would it surprise you that in the far back corner of my bathroom cabinet, there's an almost empty bottle of shower gel. It is pink, and I forgot why I bought it, I'm not really the pink type, but it was probably affordable and therefore bought. And I cannot bring myself to throw it out, because the smell shoots memories of standing in a youth hostel bathroom on Prince Edward Island up my nose. Unfortunately, shower gels have this handicap: They remind you of the situation you were in when using them. Bathrooms. So I have pretty clear memories of a Charlottetown, an Edmonton, a Calgary and one or two Vancouver bathrooms. Mental note to myself: Sunscreens allow a wider landscape of memory. Only it was way too cold on that trip across Canada to bother with sunscreen.
As I mentioned before, apart from smell there is sound as a good source for atmosphere memories. In my case that would be Pink Martini, Andie's Grey's Anatomy soundtrack and, above all, Feist. Pink Martini is salsa Thursdays and winter. Grey's Anatomy is really winter through spring, lying on the veranda and staring into the sky. Feist, Feist is summer and bridges the journey back across the Atlantic: while "Honey Honey" is the sea as seen from Wreck Beach and Kitsilano, "I Feel It All" ranges from getting up in the mornings in a red basement room (Jozina's) to sitting around the small kitchen table in a not so small boat floating along the river Rhein.
As I said, I'm a sucker for memories.
But in clinical psychology, they also say that writing has psychotherapeutic value. So I'm exorcising the flood of memories by banning them onto paper. Because I know that as beautiful as they are, they keep me from living my life here and now.

PS: Waiting for the 80 bus at Cinéma du Parc in the bleak midwinter, standing on the grid of the ventilation shaft of the shopping mall to stay warm. The most recent memory banned on patient paper.

posted by Conni @ 12:58 PM