Pensive Penguins

How do I make sure that I remember...

• the leaping feeling upon waking up and realising that it was The Day, combined with the ‘oh...’ feeling that you weren’t there waking up in the same place
• the sheer ordinary-but-amplified-to-feel-extraordinary-ness of pottering out for breakfast and eating (perfect) porridge at my local. And their amusement at my response when they asked what I had on the rest of the day
• the pleasedness of having bothered making a Proper List the night before when the time came to make sure that nothing had been forgotten
• the excitedness to see you unexpectedly, followed by the superstitious horror that I had
• the colours where the sea and the sky met when I looked out at the ocean from the busy peacefulness at the hairdresser, and the squish-pop of perfect juicy blueberries thoughtfully brought along by those who always think of the importance of snackages
• the quiet thoughtfulness of a very careful and all-too-brief shower
• the unexpected hilarity of (other people’s) Hollywood tape
• the sheer number of times that ‘squeee!’ was uttered during the course of the day
• the leaping feeling of being ready to go
• the way time sped up as my friends walked ahead of me, and then slowed down beyond all possibility as I walked in
• the look on your face and the calmness of reaching you
• the words that we, and other people, said. All of them. Every single one.
• the greatest feeling of certainty I might ever have lived
• the unexpected hilarity of penguins going kerplop and the joy from not knowing everything in advance
• the clear crispness of the afternoon that balanced on just-barely-not-too-cold
• the silly faces made by others so that I stopped worrying about looking like a startled marmot
• the relief of a pair of very small penguins sitting serenely somewhere other than Honolulu
• the nervous energy of dance costumes, directions and olive pits and realising that not all performances are about the same thing
• the feeling of we-really-did-this-and-it-really-does-feel-different every time I caught sight of the ring on your finger (and how it made all the skittering madly about beforehand suddenly completely immaterial and entirely worth it)
• the food, and whether it was really that everything I consumed all day was the best version of itself I’d ever eaten, or whether the day itself made that inevitable (and how many lemon brûlée tarts I might need to try before I can answer that question)
• the never-to-be-exceeded and completely superlative mirth that a children’s story and a collection of hand puppets can produce
• the enjoyment from finding that people had Had Fun (in capital letters, no less), and it making all the skittering madly about beforehand even more worthwhile
• the short-skirt-long-jacketed departure with more stuff to carry than should be sensibly attempted
• the view from our window of the lights around the bay
• the guiltless satisfaction of sampling both flavours of cake at some alarmingly early hour of (technically) the next morning
• the leaping feeling from the day ending with the two of us exactly the same, and also entirely different

How do I make sure that I don’t forget a single tiny second of the best, most important and most unexpectedly fun day I could possibly imagine? How do I stop worrying about the prospect that, little by little, tiny snatches of the minute specificness of it all might slip away and be lost? How do I not let it turn into an amorphous mis-remembered blur?

Picture: returntogodsgarden on Flickr

Maybe by writing these wonderings down they will stick in my mind like pins put snugly into a pincushion, but with the only piercing feeling coming from how astonishing it was that something so many people do could be so much better and so very different in the best possible ways than I’d thought.

Maybe by sending these very small but loomingly enormous rememberings out into the ether like messages in bottles that might come back to me, but that record something just so that the permanence of it existing never disappears.

Maybe by quietly thinking of those moments when something happens to remind me, and by looking for the bits of those days everywhere that can make them resemble it...

How do I make sure that I never forget?

Picture: Lady Hazel on Flickr via Gatekeeper on Tumblr