Would you allow our play to leave no bone unbroken?
~AFI~

You always remember your firsts.

An experience cannot (and should not) be explained, it can only be appreciated.

Rather than explaining an experience, one may romanticize it; romanticize, to freeze a moment and express it as it was felt. Romanticize, not romance as the definition of love, but romanticizing an experience so beautiful that a memory created should not be erased.

One can romanticize an experience, and thus freeze-frame it with as much detail and description, to come back to the memory and evoke an emotion that in time becomes a part of history. But is that not what emotion is, after all? Is it not partially a correlation between remembered feelings?

When one reaches the age of reason – or rather, when one has dealt with a history so “eventful” and challenging; when one has learned to cope and deal with the perils of maturing, it hits a pinnacle of emotional capacity. At that stage, one does not often deal with new emotions, rather a correlation between experiences felt between separate events.

Receiving one’s first gift is an amazing experience: for every gift received thereafter always brings us back to our first experience of receiving a gift. The remembered emotion; the remembered experience.

Photos speak a thousand words, but words themselves can freeze a moment and record the experience as it is felt. One does not explain the experience – one wants to know it as a memory and not recreate it as a fantasy. Expressing the memory, romanticizing an experience is what provokes passion. It is a metaphorisation of an abstract reality – but reality nonetheless. When one’s surrealism and reality intertwine and colour the memory which was meant to be black and white, the contrivance in metaphysics renders an explosion in an allegorical universe.

Every detail, every “mundane triviality,” if romanticized as beautifully as experienced, becomes the foundation for a memory, and in turn adds substance to what is commonly recognized as “prosaic.” Every limitation has a loophole: every limitation has a weakness designed to be broken through.

Moments pass; memories linger.

Retrospections last; experiences remembered.

Our emotional memory bank is resilient and buoyant. As we analyse our present in relation to our past, our experiences tolerance and acceptance level expands. All is proportionate: our experiences determine our values and priorities. The parallels between our pain and pleasure capacity are, in every respect, connected. If one has felt deep pain, one will (at any point in life) experience the same proportion of happiness.

The equilibrium and equanimity that one develops through experiences is undeniably remarkable.

Anyone can write about pain – transcribing happiness is challenging.

And to romanticize happiness – an experience so pure and so gratifying – divulges the experience to an unmitigated vertex.

An apogee. An obelisk. A culmination.

A climax.

Experiences can be frozen and treasured, preserved deep in the vault of an emotional memory bank.

Experiences and memories, when romanticised, merges the line between fantasy and memory.

Our concern for complications renders the negligence of simplicity.

        But the beauty of it all lies in the simplicity that the memory is not a construction – the simplicity of its surrealism.