Strange how memories work. My laptop Seita (a Toshiba I named after a character in a film I once saw) had been moving through time like molasses these past few weeks. Maybe that's what happens when machines get filled with too many memories - they start to dream in their own mechanical way, growing heavy with the weight of accumulated time.

I decided to do what people do when things get slow: clean house. As I dove into folders within folders, like Russian nesting dolls of digital space, I found myself staring at photographs I'd forgotten existed. That's the thing about forgotten photographs - they're like jazz records you find in the back of a dusty shop, waiting to play their particular melody of the past.

The images flickered on my screen: me in college, me in my first office job, all these versions of myself stacked up like parallel universes. Looking at them felt like watching rain fall in reverse, each drop carrying a fragment of time back up to the clouds. Nostalgia, I suppose, is just memory with a sweeter aftertaste, like whiskey that's been aged just long enough to lose its bite.

Screenshot of my photo archives since 2006.

Sometimes memories float up like bubbles in a dark well. I've been thinking about how I haven't written about those times - those strange, luminous moments that shaped me. In my family, memories have a way of dissolving, like sugar in hot tea. Alzheimer's and dementia run through our bloodline like an underground river. The scientists say it's in our genes, though who can really be sure about such things?

The weight of these unwritten stories sits in my chest like a small, smooth stone. They deserve to exist somewhere outside my mind, these fragments of time: the taste of unfamiliar spices in foreign cities, the sound of train wheels on distant tracks, the peculiar way sunshine fell across unknown streets. Writing them down feels like an act of preservation, like pressing flowers between pages of an old book.

I remember reading something Maya Angelou once wrote about the agony of carrying untold stories. Her words echoed inside me like footsteps in an empty corridor. These stories have been scratching at my consciousness lately, like a cat pawing at a closed door, demanding to be let out.

So I've decided to do it - to write again. To capture these moments before they fade like old photographs. Strange how the mind works, isn't it? How memories can feel both solid and ethereal at the same time, like clouds you could almost touch. I'll write about the adventures, the places, the moments of unexpected joy. Maybe in writing them, I'll understand something new about why they've stayed with me all this time.