happiness and on existing out of the frame

learning to remember a life whole

It is raining outside as I am backing up photos from our old family computer onto hard drive. don’t ask me why. I have severe trust issues with google drive and we aren’t drowning away any soon so its fine. Plus I love physical media. I wanted to copy them into a cd first but then I realised it’s of no use because they don’t make laptops with cd compartments anymore. welcome to 2026 guys. so many of my vivid childhood memories like barbie dhoom machale phones, fragrant erasers and those pencil shaped pencil cases don’t sell anymore but its fine, as long as we’re sure a dollar’s still not exact one hundred indian rupees.

As the photos transfer through, I see a 2x slideshow onto play. I cannot catch up with the speed so I finally open the folder and start viewing them seperately, one by one, diving deep into the rabbit hole of my golden years. A plethora of memories weigh me down as I keep clicking the next button. But more than the memories, a variety of questions run through my mind and I find myself hyper fixated on the one “was I happy enough?” like actual happiness. no play pretend. I can’t tell you if I got a specific answer or not but I surely was very confused on my part.

You see, more often than not we look at old carousels of pictures from a specific time of this big life and we think to ourselves: “oh I used to be so happy/ healthy this time around” “oh the scars on my face used to be less prominent then” or “we had such a blast then” but are these conclusions that we reach to really true? I don’t think so. a possible explanation is that we capture photos of the luminous moments of life. the easy moments. the moments that we would want to remember and reminisce about, say, ten years down the drain. What happens off-camera is something we remember. the photos don’t. There are ugly moments. brittle relationships. The almost physical fights we don’t wanna recollect. We humans love to look flawless, even to ourselves. We love to very conveniently forget the bad parts like nightmares we don’t wanna go back to. We have a habit of laminating the past and keeping it like a trophy on the front shelf of the room for everyone to see. we super glue certain fragments of the past with us and leave out the rest. We put on a veil of pink and then judge the remnants of it.

Now of course you’ll ask me, isn’t that the whole point of life? To keep the best people and incidents in the SD card/ and leave out the unpleasant ones? I’d agree with you too because I find myself a human too, even I’d want my prefrontal cortex to swell with happy memories, not ugly. But at the same time, I don’t wanna to keep myself under an illusion and view the past through a rose-tinted lens. I want to remember perfect and clear memories of who I was, who I surrounded myself with, what were my passions/ hobbies on particular time stamps of the past too.

Stumbling upon a picture of my fifth birthday, if I faintly remember, was a whole day trip with my parents. The first few hours of the day went into exploring the more popular parts of the city and when we had successfully mapped all of them we headed to the queiter ones. One such place was statue circle. A decently calm gardenesque place where either couples or old folks came to spend some time away from the noise of everyday. for some reason, I never saw any families there except mine but it was totally fine by me because that meant my parents wouldn’t force me into sharing my toys and stuff with totally unknown stranger kids like they did at the public park. It was my birthday after all. I was the main character (a lil grumpy one haha). I had put on my beautiful blue dress with my matching blue star shaped hair clip and felt as pretty as a child could, at that age. Afternoon bled into evening, and finally I had to cut the cake. I remember wishing for loads of new dresses and toys. I also remember accidentally breaking an artefact my father had gotten from his workplace. I was scolded and shouted upon like anything. And I was locked out of my home for an hour because of this, I remember that too. I wanted to, but I can’t forget the ugly parts you see. I can’t forget the time when I was unable to solve an algebra question on the blackboard and could sense the evident dissatisfaction on our my maths tutor’s face. “I’ll hit you with a tight slap”, she said. And the next thing I knew my cheek was red. I could feel the burning, It would’ve been red. violence & violence & violence. I could feel every bone & limb in my body then.

And then there was ten year old me, grown up, but of course still a child. I don’t remember what in the world had I even done for this, but all of a sudden my clothes were being packed into a suitcase by my father. He pulled me firmly by the hand and I was being stuffed in the car along with the suitcase, bawling my eyes out. What had I even done? I couldn’t comprehend it for the life of me. The word sorry lost all meaning for me that day because I pled & I pled & I pled but I was met with violence. But in the photos it doesn’t seem like that I know. It’s happy. We’re happy.

Even though I am over these experiences to the point where I feel foreign from them, no matter what I do, I can’t forget them.

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I don’t like being drunk on the most important moments of my life, because I think it’s a thing coward people do. People who wanna experience life second-handedly and people who are utter cowards. On the contrary, this is almost a nightmare to me: To be a spectator of your own life. I wanna be sober on the days that I win and even the days that I lose but still I can’t pinpoint the reason as to why the people that get wasted do. Maybe it’s because there are an onslaught of responsibilities on their head and they just wanna do away with them, for once? but that doesn’t justify it right. I think it’s because they are tired of performing, for the audience, for the people that actually hold no real meaning in their life.

So if there had to be a drug in your own mind that makes you numb to the surrounds, then I have to admit I was on it too. For the last two years. It was only performance. and celebration. sometimes. but I walked out of that hell, gladly.

Two years later, yesterday I went to my high school, where I spent the most forgetful two years of my life and as soon as I stepped into that building, my first instinct was to walk out. I could see children playing outside in forty degrees but I was the one who felt nauseated.. I convinced myself it was a small paperwork and I’d get done with it in an hour or so. So I drank my feelings and waited. On the contrary, I kept thinking this is the last time I have to come here.

Now even though I can see the photos getting backed up in front of my eyes, my real memories outweigh the curated ones. I smile in my graduation photo, and to be honest maybe I was happy too. but you see, I really don’t remember it because I was high on the drug of performing. for me. for everyone. & the memories are more bitter than sweet.

To think of it, I do see my home in the city that I live in, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel suffocated here too. This city has seen all of my firsts. My first friendships (my bestfriend is from here too), my first heartbreaks, first night out’s and first sneak out’s too. So I do love this city. And I did fell at peace here. Not everyday, but I think that’s why I leave. And it lets me. “It loves me enough to let me go” I whisper to myself as the backup is ninety nine percent done.

And that takes me to the question I asked in the beginning - “Was I happy enough?

I think yes. Even in fragments, Even in parts, I was happy. And isn’t that all that matters? I’m not a philosopher, but as much as I’ve tasted this thing called life, it is a balance of bitter & sweet. of good & bad. of hope & despair. of love & loss. of remembering & forgetting and lastly, of good memories & bad memories. It’s just that we have to know when to dwell on the memories that exist outside of the frame and when to reminisce the ones inside it.

There is a ghazal that I love that sums all of it up:

“sirf shabnam hi shaan-e-gullistan nahi, shola-o-gul ka bhi daur chalta rahe;

ashq bhi chasme-e-purnam se behte rahein aur dil se dhuaan bhi nikalata rahe”

(“may this garden not only know the quiet of dew, but also the season of flames and flowers; may tears continue to flow from tearful eyes, and may the heart still have it’s share of smoke”)