What am I going to remember

It’s a cool and calm Tuesday morning. The temperature is hovering just above 60 degrees, and it’s perfect weather for me to open my bedroom window, let some of my new music play as I listen for things that need to be changed, and sit here at the computer at 3:30 in the morning and write a new post to the blog.

I had gone out earlier to clean the van, and it started to rain slightly. It was refreshing, in a way, to feel cold rain on a warm day in January. If I remember right, about this time last year, it was freezing cold. But the weekend overall has been pretty mild, our cold front having pushed through already and, I’m sure, awaiting another one to push its way through within the next week.

So I guess the bottom line would be to enjoy the nice weather while it lasts.

I’ve been sick the past four or five days. Some sort of stomach bug is going around, and I seem to have gotten it. It’s a lot of fun, with dehydration and mucous draining into the stomach being the two top winners of the various symptoms that come with the bug. I’ve been pretty out of it, and have used the last few days of sickness as a good excuse to sleep longer hours than usual. I have yet to switch the car insurance over to my name completely, but I’ve got a few more days to that without my father getting too up in arms at me about it.

Earlier, I was creating a new song (a very simple one, featuring just a piano synthesizer and a melody, for me, that invokes memories of things gone by and events and people that have long since passed into the pages of my history) and I found myself thinking: What am I going to remember?

Ten years from now, what will I remember from my childhood? Sometimes I find myself thinking about this (this is a recurring thought for me) and I wonder.

Is it going to be the summer at Scout Camp, fishing and listening to stories at the bonfire? Is it going to be that first snow that covered the backyard completely, and our dog Diesel bounding through it, disappearing momentarily before reappearing as she jumped up from beneath the frosty white mist?

Is it going to be great grandfather critiquing my pancakes, or the summers in Florida spent with my family at the beaches and the first Books-a-million I had ever seen (also amazing to me at the time was the fact that they “had over 1 million books”…) Is it going to be my father going to Sonic and bringing back slushees (flavored iced drinks) for everyone on the block?

Is it going to be the memory of my first kiss, my first sleepover, my first best friend, my first day of high-school (or further back, my first day of 3rd grade)?

Or is it going to be the bad things I’ve done, the people I’ve hurt, the things I’ve destroyed? The summers spent on probation, in rehabilitation, or fighting my family on a various number of topics and subjects. Is it going to be the 2 weeks I spent running, the car crash that ensued, and the years afterward which I spent continuing to run?

Is it going to be a memory of a night spent in the cold, wondering where I was going, with the rain pouring down on me in buckets, drenching me to my bones? Is it going to be the first shooting star I had ever seen, while sitting outside at 5 in the morning wondering whether I wanted to face my problems at home or just run and never look back.

Are my memories going to be of those who helped me, or those who hurt me? Those almost got killed protecting me, or those who tried to kill me in the first place?

Our memories are what make us, and I guess my only question is: what will mine make me? Or is it to the point where I’m already made into what I’m going to be, and the only thing I can do now is look back at everything I’ve witnessed, everything I’ve learned, and be glad that it turned out better than it could have?