Does place remind you of memories, or memories remind you of place?

When I was in elementary school, kids loved horror stories. Every post-lunch nap time, after the head teacher had left the room, supposing all the kids were sound asleep, all my 7 – 8-year-old friends crawled out of their positions to form a circle – horror stories time. They competed against each other over who are the bravest by telling as many scary tales they remember as possible. Lights must be turned off so that it created no suspicion for the school overseer walking outside. Taking turn, whoever has a story would sit in the middle of the circle. Some audience might grab their blankets, pillows and jackets to prepare for the jump scares – although this method is effective as it offers something to hold on to, it’s not recommended since you are appearing as “the cowards”. Ultimately, if you met a ghost, or had any real horrifying spiritual experience yourself, you instantly “won” the finale – as long as you can persuade everyone you are telling the truth with the most detailed story.

I remember walking across an abandoned construction site in my neighborhood when I was seven. I knew it had been there for a long time, with the surrounding fences being fully graffitied. For some unusual reasons, my curiosity urged me to move closer to the fence and look through a hole in the metal fences. I don’t really remember what I saw that day, but there were two things I’m sure about: one, I did see something, and two, the horror story I told my friends the morning after was absolutely made up.

The next day’s nap time, I was ready for my turn to sit in the middle of the horror circle. I told them there was a large wheat field behind the fences: “… the bushes grew too high that I could barely see the other side of the field, but I decided to explore it. I crawled under a broken fence and got behind the wall. I went to the middle of the field and saw a room, perhaps it was the construction workers’. I walked inside and it was a classroom, and on the board, there were … LETTER DRAWN BY BLOOD! I immediately ran away, not looking back even once until I reached the edge of the field. I looked at the room once before crawling out, and the room disappeared.”

Everyone liked that story. Later, I kept telling that story over and over again to many other people with the exact same details. Gradually, that construction site became one of the core-memory places in my childhood. All I remember about it, even now, is still and only the wheat color of the field in the story. It was not until a few years ago that I came across that site again. In a more correct word, I was startled by it. It has become a motel, not even a big one. An unsettlement was triggered when I first saw it: “this is not right.” It was not merely big enough for two tennis courts, and by no means can be compared to the field in my imagination. Everything turned out to be false memories.

The real construction site is nothing more than just a domain, to which it links the memory with another imaginary location. I can still visualize the field with tall bushes in the story when I was seven, but everything is stained with the dark smudges of my disbelief. Research conducted by Northwestern Medicine and published in the Journal of Neuroscience proves that every time people remember an event from the past, their brains distort it to some extent, and that the next time they do it, they only remember the last recall, not the original memory. With that being said, places in memory are not supposed to be real? Along with time, they will likely be altered, replaced and eventually omitted from the story. Our brains function like a pair of near-sighted glasses: the older the memory is, the further it drifts to the edge of the lenses. We suppose the cup our high school best friend gave us for graduation gift would have the shape of any other cups; so would our kindergarten classroom, grandmother’s house backyard, and neighborhood playground.

Then, just like any processing program, the brain dismisses any extra details that require extra “memory storage”. As soon as they all become just-like-any-other-cup, room, backyard and playground, they are out-of-focus. Occasionally, a random breeze of thought could recall them in a vague remembrance, but to bring it back fresh, clear, and accurate is hardly ever possible. However, “time is relative” (Albert Einstein), and so are places - indeed, places are even more. “The rate at which time passes depends on your frame of reference”, but when it flew by, we know it's gone. Looking at the childhood pictures, we know it would never come back. When our parents’ hairs turn grey through aging, we know it is unreversible. But places, they can live while not be existing at all – they “live” in the memory, replicated, recreated, reproducing, developing as an independent entity. I may have come across the construction site again for a thousand times, even before it turned to the apartment building, but it had never been the same as the first time I peered through the fences. Perhaps, I have never remembered what was behind the fences – maybe it was replaced right the moment it was perceived.

Nevertheless, it is not always the case that places are surreal and play no vital role in constructing a memory. In some circumstances, without the physical places, memories become parasites without hosting body. Without the domain, we lose the access to the entire network.

The summer I finished my eighth grade, my secondary school turned 70 years old. To celebrate this event, despite how nonsensical and objected as it was, they decided to demolish the entire place to turn it into a brand new, modern facility. The last day of school was also a farewell to the old buildings where I and my friends had grown up together for three years. The most drastic transition of our human’s life - from a crying baby to an annoying unstable teenager - took place there. Everything would perish in just a few months. I remembered staying after the commencement with my friends to take the last look around the school. We signed on the wall, thanked it for a wonderful time, and never saw it again. Two months later, I was standing on the terrace of the elementary school where my school borrowed for students to study for a year while it was in construction, looking over a massive pile of debris. There lay my three-year memory – fragmented and scattered. For the first time in my life, I felt a sense of loss. As if someone has dug a hole in my stomach, parts of me, unidentifiable ones, poured out like water from some leaked pipes of an old house – it could be from anywhere, or all at once. In this era of technology and social media, staying in contact is never a problem. Why was my chest still so heavy but missing something at the same time?

My parents love travelling a lot. We travel together through many places all over the world. Every once in a while, especially when I was crossing the street or squeezing myself in a crowd, I would remind myself of the fact that “this may be the last time you see this place”, or “this may be the last time you see these people.” Seven billion people in this world, I may have encounter one thirtieth of them just by wandering around, but how many of whom have I been aware?

The feeling which dragged me down when looking at my old secondary school being crushed down piece by piece was not nostalgia. It’s an anticipatory fear. I was not afraid of the separation but the infinite drift-away without a harbor to look back. Places are not memory boxes but safety floats and hazard flags midst the ocean of memories. Places welcomes people back to their comfort zone when the future tears them apart. They are the starting lines – in a way that the only time you are mindful of it is when you are about to leave it behind, or it was already out of sight. But knowing it’s still there gives your hustling heart a sense of assurance, a pride, of the past journey and a foundation to confront what’s ahead. It’s the piles of pages you have finished in the novel of life that urge you to turn to a new chapter. Yet, what would we do without it? We lost and got lost. If there were no familiarity that holds us back, would we pass by it like strangers? Instead of the epiphanic, abrupt stop in front of the gate, realizing “Wow, it’s still here the whole time”, it would be the quick wistful glance – “It used to be here.” Memories co-exist with places, until either of which disappears. It’s like playing Jenga, when you take out a core base, things start to corrupt and eventually perish into oblivion.

It has become one of my habits to see everything as it’s my last time. Every time I go around the campus of the university I’m studying abroad at. I wonder what it would feel like to close this door for the last time – in case I would never be able to return. Even though my memories may have not even been created yet, a sense of longing is still stirred in my stomach, bitter in my throat. “Far from eye, far from heart” – would it be applied every time that an absence of places would rob me of my memories? The vulnerability of memories overwhelms me with the responsibility to get attached to the places while I’m still present, but at the same time indulge me with the lazy thought that there is no point in attempting to invest in an anticipated loss.