Memories can be volatile, surfacing in effervescent bursts in my head, charging forth from brief encounters, telltale sounds, and that exotic potpourri of scents I can't describe nor forget.
They alight upon my mind at the oddest moments, causing me to pause before the obligatory mental shrug, the return to the ever-pressing present.
I was brushing my teeth the other day when my eye settled on the abused green and white tube of toothpaste I've been using all summer. Something about my toothpaste, perhaps its placement on the sink edge or the way the cap was only screwed on halfway, caused a memory to abruptly erupt in my consciousness. Flung back in time, I reappeared in the heady heat of Wenzhou in summer. The tube of toothpaste--Crest Spearmint Extreme Clean--sat on a crowded counter top, between the metal basin of the sink and a rack of chopsticks, caked with tonight's dinner. I was brushing my teeth as I did every night, clad only in my underwear, my ye ye (grandfather) and nai nai (grandmother) asleep in the living room of their two room apartment. Outside the kitchenette's sliver of a window, I could see the dark shades of drying clothes hanging limply on crisscrossing clotheslines. Murmured strings of conversation, spoken in the indecipherable "Wenzhou hua", cut through the stifling night and I felt quite sharply the dizzying vertigo of being far from home and alone in my head.
The memory is more a singular image than a story in movable color and sound. It's me, brushing my teeth, in blue-gray boxer briefs and nothing else, the slump of my shoulders articulating the desolation of my last childhood summer. It's not a particularly bad memory. I loved my trip to China this summer. It gave me solitude, a certain peace of mind. Yet it's not a joyous tableau either. It's simply a memory, a piece of my past that happens to appear when I look at that crumpled tube of toothpaste and allow myself to remember.
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