Graduation

Memories play a powerful role in our lives. They lock away experiences into miniature motion pictures for only us to see, at times so distinct that they evoke deep, visceral feelings and emotions. Perhaps even more remarkable is their affective plasticity: the way that the sentiment attached to a memory can ebb and flow as you go through life and accrue wisdom.

In my past, you on the other side of the glass

Of my memory's museum

My early adolescence was defined by Kanye’s hit album, Graduation. Yeezy fans reading this, you know how it goes: I knew Stronger and Good Life by heart. My eldest brother, Jim, showed me Flashing Lights one night and it soon became my anthem. Not that I could relate to it in any way, but damn did I love that song. 

Jim was in the prime of his angsty teenage years and had arrived home one night well into the deep hours of the evening. The time when morning is no nearer than night; when everything seems still. My bedroom door was ajar as to protect me from being trapped in with the monsters. The fluorescent hallway bathroom light loomed, the sounds of Jim’s haunting decisions from earlier that evening lurking in with it. My father’s booming voice rattled the once-calm house as I lay in my bed shaking, tears staining my Batman pajamas. Flashing Lights ran through my head after being on repeat the entire day on my iPod Nano. 

End memory. 

I know it's been a while

Sweetheart, we hardly talk, I was doing my thing

For years, I refused to listen to Flashing Lights. It was intimately fixed to the grim memory of ugly fluorescent lights, of fear for my brother, of the uneasy feeling of confusion that comes with being a child. The deep base coupled with the sleazy, futuristic sample of Little Child Runnin’ Wild made my chest tighten.

Enter senior year of high school. I sit at a party, bottles of cheap liquor are being passed around, each sip sinking me deeper into the couch. The warm, early-summer-evening light fades in as Flashing Lights begins to play. I hear my dad’s thunderous voice, I see the light that had induced instinctive distress for years.

No fear. No unease. No tears.

I sit and ponder on the realization that I am in the same position as Jim was about a decade prior… young, ignorant, definitely angsty, and maybe a little too drunk. But I am surrounded by great friends. I am unencumbered by the worries of life or the weight of future decisions. The UV Blue had taken that all away. Yesterday will not come, and tomorrow never happened.

My decisions will be hitting that same toilet water later in the night. It doesn’t matter. The flashing lights are no longer an ugly fluorescent. They are warm and glow with relief.

And the weather so breezy

Man, why can't life always be this easy?

She in the mirror dancing so sleazy

I get a call like "Where are you Yeezy?"