FROZEN IN TIME

I happened across an old photograph the other day when I was trying to track down a completely different image for a completely different reason. I rarely look in those old albums any more because after the years of fun they also contain images from chunks of my life I’d rather forget about, but, as usual, once the thought had been triggered there was no stopping me, and, whilst I did actually find what I was looking for, other memories unavoidably got stirred up. Sometimes life will do that to you and send your memories off in unexpected directions and thinking about things that you hadn’t thought about in years. The picture was of someone with whom I thought I was once probably rather impressed way, way back in the mists of time before the fates got their chance to sink their claws into me and tear me apart for later hands to try to put back together again. A period of time when there was another me who perhaps still exists, sitting frozen in time, locked in the corners of other people’s memories of the me that used to be.

Or maybe everyone has forgotten him.

Who knows?

Because of the “Swiss Cheese” nature of my memory, I had, I think, completely forgotten all about the day when I took that specific picture. It’s not that I’d ever completely forgotten the actual subject of the picture, of course, but I had forgotten paying that particular visit and taking that particular snapshot so many months after my memory was unreliably telling me I had already put that particular phase of my life far behind me and that I had never returned to it. The evidence in that old album is quite clear, proving that I did once return to that fondly remembered stamping ground after I thought I’d left it forever, and it seems that the memory sometimes does actually decide to cheat and I was remembering my own history quite wrongly...

I think I’ve mentioned before that my life as an art student wasn’t the most eventful from a personal point of view, which does rather go against every cliché ever written about art school antics, but then, I suppose I’ve never been much of a one for embracing the cliché, which is, of course, hugely ironic as my daily outpourings are now full of the most cliché-ridden text that it is possible to muster, as you have no doubt already realised.

But I suppose that I must have had my own little yearnings, even if I never really acted upon them. In that environment it was very hard not to be distracted by the bright young things that surrounded me who always managed to remain completely oblivious to whatever charms I thought I had. Braver, more self-confident souls would spend those years building relationships and breaking hearts, but some of us, it seemed, were always destined to remain on the substitute’s benches of life, watching the world have whatever happiness and fun it could as we viewed it all happening from the sidelines, but, on the bright side, also being insulated from the sadness and despair such things also brought along with them in the great balancing act of life.

Still, there in my hand was an image of someone who I haven’t seen since the day the picture was taken, standing there preserved forever, frozen in time exactly as I remember them being and neither of us aware, I imagine,  that as I took that snapshot we were talking to each other for the very last time we probably ever would. The intervening twenty-five years (God… Is it really that long?) have done nothing to change the image of them that I still have frozen in my mind even though I know that somewhere out there in the real world, an older, wiser, and hopefully much more contented version of this particular person is probably living a perfectly happy life without ever giving the insecure and rather pathetic potato-faced one behind the camera that day even the slightest thought.

This is how it should be, of course, and, until I just happened to find that picture, this is how it was in my mind, too. It’s strange what you remember, but it’s equally strange what you forget, and for a few moments the various snapshots held in my memory of a three year friendship flooded through my synapses and I began to remember another of the unlikely “might have beens” of life, those bizarre and unfathomable “what ifs” that occasionally come knocking on the doors of the subconscious in the long, dark hours of the night.

I say “might have beens” although, in all honesty, it was definitely more of a “wouldn’t have been” and, of course, in the impossible reality of it having turned into an “actually been”, real life would have been its usual brutal self and I would almost certainly have messed things up and made yet another person very unhappy because the person I was then really would not have made a success of such a situation. Sometimes those “might have beens” are better left alone and forgotten where they deserve to be.

Anyway, for much of the three years of that friendship, whatever possibilities that I might secretly have even vaguely considered were simply not possible because there was already an existing and very committed relationship in place that I seem to recall only really foundered as I was on the brink of heading off into the great adventure of postgraduate life, or “long-term unemployment” as we called it back then, and, whilst I might very well have been a great many things over the years, I like to think that I was never brave enough or foolish enough to be the sort of scoundrel or cad that might have attempted to upset that particular apple cart for someone else.

I don’t know, maybe it was more due to having the kind of fear which comes from my dislike of any kind of confrontation, or perhaps I never really fancied getting a punch on the nose from someone I would have had to have wronged in order to achieve such a situation developing, or even from the very someone I might have considered suggesting (to their utter distain, I’m sure) such an unlikely possibility to. Whatever the reasons, I obviously would never have had either enough faith in my abilities to be a viable alternative, or enough commitment to my own well-disguised finer qualities to take any sort of genuine leap of faith.

So, we come to the moment of that photograph, taken a few months after I had graduated and moved back home to become firmly established as one of Thatcher’s lost generation. Somehow I must have scraped together enough money to buy a train ticket and return to my former college for some kind of reunion event and be reunited with both my own graduating class and those friends still working on the treadmill of achieving one of the stepping stones towards their own goals in life. Presumably, from looking through that album, over the course of that visit, I took the time to visit as many of the people I still knew to be living in that part of the world as I possibly could, including that happy looking person captured in my photograph and now forever preserved in that permanent state of eternal youth in my mind at least, as everyone else I knew back then still is. By the time of that meeting, of course, because the fates really do have no mercy when it comes to their sense of timing, it was me who was “unavailable” (not that it was an issue, I’m sure) and, because I’m not by nature one of life’s philanderers, another moment in the river of infinite possibilities passed into the poignant ocean of lost opportunities and (perhaps ever so slightly), regretfulness.

Of course, you can never really know anything of the life not lived, and if you had lived it, whatever happiness you currently do have could very well have been made impossible because you had chosen a different course that took you somewhere else. Who knows what darker and sadder possibilities lay in the path not chosen. There is also the much darker possibility of another outcome of these unknown stories, because I don’t even know whether this person is alive or dead, or whether tragedy and illness tainted their life which I have obviously been spared so that I could instead endure my own share of such things in my own little world. Many of those choices, if taken, would have meant other meetings and other friendships would never have happened, so all-in-all, you have to be happy with your lot in life because if you change just one thing, everything changes.

So, here’s to all those “might have beens”. Sometimes the life not lived can seems just a little appealing because the harsh realities that occasionally pepper the life you have lived never got to come along and spoil them, and, for me at least, it’s the “might have beens” that stimulate the imagination and help me to weave my stories, and create my characters and situations, and I definitely think they’re better off being just that.

For all of us.

Nevertheless, I find myself still hoping that that particular person, and indeed, all of those friends I abandoned so long ago, are, at the very least, having a happy life, even if I know that, statistically, into all of them a little rain must have fallen.

I just hope you’ve all avoided the monsoon season.