Converting Memories

My dad finally had all of our old home movies digitally converted from those little, 8mm video tapes that had to be loaded into the special slot of a larger VHS tape just to watch them. There were probably 70 or 80 of those little tapes, some labeled with thick, black marker, some left namelessly blank, all packed away neatly in an old, wooden clementine crate that sat under the TV in my parents’ bedroom for decades, collecting layers of dust.

Maybe it’s because I’m the youngest in the family, and it’s harder for me to remember a lot of the things that my older siblings recollect vividly, or maybe it’s just because I’m notoriously the most precious about capturing and preserving sentimental moments in the family, but when I was finally able to watch all of the videos at the click of a mousepad on my laptop computer, I relished in it. 

Hours would go by in what seemed like the blink of an eye. Sometimes, in between files, I would look up at the numbers in the top right hand corner of the screen and reluctantly realize how much time had passed, and how an elbow or a foot was asleep, tingling with numbness from the prolonged lack of circulation. I would exhale a deep sigh and cringe as I rearranged the position of my aching body parts, trying to decide if I should watch one more or cut myself off.

Other times, a small, rectangular alert box would pop into the middle of the screen, automatically stopping the movie to warn that the battery life was low. Usually, someone else in my family, my mother, or my sister, maybe, would start off watching with me, but they’d eventually drift away to other tasks or distractions long before I was ready to call it quits. 

I partly wondered if I had an addiction to reliving the past. I was fascinated and curious and mystified by it. It felt as if there was something necessary for me to understand, some undiscovered truth, buried deep inside the endless hours of Christmas mornings and birthday parties, school plays and Halloween fashion shows, and squealing giggles through summertime sprinklers in the backyard.

I felt a tragic sense of disconnection to the tiny, carefree human, smiling to show her missing teeth, or singing while she played in the sandbox, looking back at me through a dark, glass lens converted into small, plastic tapes converted into digital bytes of memory. 

She laughed joyously at her own knock-knock jokes and made up her own songs as she proudly sang them. Her hair stuck out wildly in every direction and her clothes didn’t match, but she simply couldn’t be bothered. She was too busy climbing trees and smashing rocks apart on the driveway to see what they looked like on the inside.

When she dunked her head under the freezing cold water in the kiddie pool and accidentally hit her face on the bottom, she bravely came back up, soaking wet and shivering, to confirm that she would be okay. 

I longed to know that little girl again. I searched and searched for the right shot, or the right sound, or the right anything that might confirm she still existed somewhere inside of me. That, even after growing up into an entirely different-looking body with a different-sounding voice, and even after forgetting so many specific moments over so many long, lost years, the little life I watched on the screen and the real life I lived outside of it could still be one and the same. 

For days, maybe even for weeks, I clicked through the video files, laughing and crying, fast forwarding and rewinding… but the little girl proved stubborn. She wouldn’t give up any hints. She wouldn’t pause, even for just a brief second, to look back at me and reflect a glimmer of promise. She kept the truth I so desired to find concealed behind her persistent, careful eyes. 

But then, what was I really expecting? Certainly, after watching all of those home movies until my limbs went numb, I knew better than anyone that the little girl was not just going to suddenly turn to me and surrender a token of understanding. 

No, instead, she was going to keep me searching for myself.