In the Dark

I finished watching the new series of “In the Dark” yesterday and it really got me thinking. The main character is blind, but she was around her teenage years when it happened. This being said, as she got older time and darkness took her memories with her. 

When you’re blind for a lengthy amount of time you stop being able to remember things the way that they were. Images blur and eventually go black. Nostalgia can’t really exist the way that it does for those with clear vision. You miss people, not necessarily places. You can’t associate images with feelings.

And for a moment I envied her. 

There are pictures all over my room of captured moments in time. Times that existed, that I remember so clearly, but can never have back, not in the exact same way. And they are hard to look at without nostalgia creeping into my mind. 

A photo of six friends in a dorm room drinking wine and laughing out of sheer joy. My mother and father married and in love on either side of an adolescent Katie at a zoo. An image of Peyton with an ice cream cone in front of the Coney Island ferris wheel after laughing all day, and before noticing the third degree burns caused by the sun. Colleen, Isabelle, Siena, and I in Times Square pretending to be tourists after going into the Hamilton store. Kyle with iced coffee because he has always refused to drink it hot. Paul Madison and I on my bed in my old apartment after he brought me “way too overpriced” oatmeal when I was sick. A photo of Isabelle walking down 3rd Ave in her blazer, it’s one that she will show her kids one day, a time when she was really and truly happy.

But if I were blind, looking at those times of sheer bliss wouldn’t hurt so damn much. It’s hard to find the positive in the now when nothing feels as magical as the past. Seeing things means witnessing change. It means making new memories that you’ll look back on with the same feeling of nostalgia this time next year, or in the next decade.

After that moment of envy passed I felt selfish, and rightfully so. One day all of this change will be seen as a blessing, I just can’t see it yet. I’m still in the dark.