keta /KAY-tah/
n. an image that inexplicably leaps back into your mind from the distant past.
You are immersed in the passage of time. Sometimes you can feel the current moving. Sometimes you forget it’s there, only to be reminded again, another in a series of passing moments. A moment is defined by its momentum. It keeps moving. We think of a memory as somehow dead. As a memorial, anchored in its own time and place. A half buried reminder of what was once here. You can’t just hang on to things. You have to let go. You have to move on. It’s hard to imagine that certain memories are still alive. Still fighting against the current. Struggling to keep up. That certain images still have the power to leap back into the present. So you look across the room at someone you know. Maybe they’re all grown up. Maybe they have children of their own. Maybe you’ve known them for 50 years. But in your eyes they are still the same goofy kid you once knew. It’s not just the moments that we remember. Not the grand gestures and catered ceremonies. Not the world we capture poised and smiling in photos. It’s the invisible things. In minutes. The cheap raw material of ordinary time. These are the images that will linger in your mind, moving back and forth. Still developing.
~ John Koenig
Source: Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
See more by John Koenig: Sunday Morning: Sonder
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