Tactile Memories: Love in the digital age
Recently, I had lunch with my aunt. She is, without a doubt, the most outrageous woman I know. Whenever I hear the word ‘fabulous’, I hear it in her voice. She embodies the word. Four husbands, four divorces, all of them desperately in love with her. And at this lunch, she told me she discovered an old box of her love letters locked within her study. Her handyman, an incredibly handsome one from the way she described him, chopped it open for her while she was redecorating.
“Blanketed by dusk and a few fly wings,” she said, “were my years, darling. My greatest years.”
She pulled the letters from her bag. Wound tightly in blue ribbon, I ran my fingers over the faded paper and the swooping cursive. As effervescent as ever, she sipped her tea while regaling the stories of her love affairs. I listened intently and flicked through the pages and pages of writings.
It’s funny, the way memory morphs in the mind. My aunt claims she can no longer fully remember the face of her first husband, it being almost 50 years since she’d last seen him. But she remembers exact conversations they had, the words that wounded her, his funniest jokes, the way he kissed.
A shroud of mourning for our generation fell over me during that lunch. We are the first intangible generation. When we are aged and our minds fail us, we won’t have photo albums to flick through. We won’t have letters like these to squint at and laugh at the obscenities of our young loves. What will we have to remember this time?
Memories give us only half the picture. They do not capture a laugh and physicalise it. They do not make our words tactile. Our passions won’t be carved out by furious scribbles. These are the good years, as my aunt would say, and time weighs on us with an overwhelming gravity, waiting to sink these years into our subconscious so that only the faint outline of the wilderness of our twenties will be remembered.
If I can urge you to do anything, it is to physicalise your existence. Do not leave your memories to their own devices. They will fail you one day.
Words by Holly Kent
