Blackmailing Myself

Facebook, the ultimate blackmailers weapon, keeps reminding me of someone’s birthday. Every morning it’s Daniel's or Dean’s or Maddi’s and it says for me to, “Help them have a great day!” Sitting in class, my history teacher speaks about gas chambers or death marches, while I am only wondering when my phone will buzz telling me it’s time to wish someone a happy birthday.

Buzz Buzz

There it goes in my pocket, 8:30 am exactly. I open my phone and see that it is yet another person I vaguely know and decide not to say anything. I click my home button and an ache of terror goes through my stomach. Facebook had decided to show me what was posted on my wall 5 years ago, perhaps karma for my lack of birthday cheer.

            Did I really post those 5 years ago? What was I thinking? I don’t remember being such an idiot. In fact I don’t remember those years at all. Minutes into hours, hours into days, days into years, my brain seemed to group, rather clumsily, my memories.

            I leaned back in my chair and my hair got caught on one of the metal buttons. Oh no, this has happened way to many times before. Prepare to get a chunk of hair pulled out. I decided to not move till I was forced too.

            When I try to remember those times, I can’t remember what I must have looked like to other people, probably because I never can truly experience looking at myself objectively. Yet this, 5 years later, is quite possibly the most objective I could be. When I see this person on my phone, I see her and not me. I can judge her and laugh at her because I am no longer her. However, the terror comes when I realize that I was her at one point. To be able to see the change and know that she created me was certainly humbling in the least.

            All of those past experiences that hadn’t happened yet to her in that picture proved how each one of those experiences truly effect our present. However, this throwback to 5 years ago gave me a different realization. Past does not only effect the present, present effects the past.

            Before entering this classroom, before sitting down, before learning about Nazis, before getting my hair caught in the chair, my memory of who I was came from the perception through the present. When I looked back, my image of myself 5 years prior is tainted with today. It painted her perhaps in a rosy light, an oblivious light. Yet pictures have the capability of not changing overtime. When we look at a picture yesterday or today or tomorrow, the only thing that changes is our perception. The present changes the past as much as past changes the present.

            Why is it that only some memories come back to me, and others seem to disintegrate till a photo shows the evidence that it truly happened? I can’t imagine in the next 5 years receiving a notification on Facebook about today. In truth, I probably wont even remember right now, and yet this realization seems invaluable regardless of its permanence in my memories.