Faceless, nameless, unforgettable

You know those relatively mundane moments that you remember forever? The right friends, the right music, the right lighting, the right temperature: suddenly there’s this moment that you know you’ll never forget. It’s not a rush of fear or adrenaline, it’s not an event or circumstance, it’s just a moment that somehow wrote itself to your permanent storage.

It’s when the band goes into the breakdown and the lights go blue. The venue is just quiet enough to yell something in your friend’s ear before you feel the beat start to pick up, and then it happens: the blinders come on in their amber glory and you’re flooded with the sound. Everyone else disappears and the fatigue of standing through the opening act just fades away.

It’s that moment when you were standing next to the picnic table and the portable stereo was playing something danceable but not particularly memorable. It’s hard to remember who was there, but the setting sun and the smell of the campfire and lingering firework smoke was just right; the memory is seared into your brain as a combination of visual, olfactory and audio sensations.

It doesn’t really matter when or where, even who. It doesn’t matter if I took a picture, tweeted it or told anybody about it. Without faces, without names, these are the memories that will keep me warm when everything else grows cold.

- Brett Terpstra