[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER SABER: TRIO OF DEEP SIN



“And I miss Tara and Melissa, Allen and John
And you'll never have friends like you did when you were young
But our bodies were pulled away and swept out to the sea
And I'd call and say hi if I thought you'd remember me
‘cause some things are worth leaving old memories for”
-The Elected, “Greetings in Braille”

All memories are loss.

It’s the nature of memory as a past tense. It’s something that happened, but is now over; a feeling tied to a moment that can’t be touched. It’s weightless but ever-present. We say “haunted by memory” because memories are like ghosts: the aftermath of decisions and actions, loves and their lacking. We go through life accumulating memories, and eventually, the weight of them becomes another obstacle to overcome, a foe to be bested. What happened to the people we were, and the people we knew? What would we have done differently? What do we regret? What do we miss?

Your early 30s is when you inevitably feel it. Your life has started, hopefully. Education and apprenticeship is over, and you’re free to make your own choices. The tight-knit friendships of your youth are exposed as proximity, and steadily peeled away through inattention or circumstance. Best friends become friends become acquaintances become social media reminders of birthdays. It’s no one’s fault. Everyone’s stories are separating, and becoming more complex; the cast of characters getting their own spin-offs, and new supporting casts to go along with them. You get focused on your goals and accompanying milestones: romance, children, career, etc. The parts of your life that were occupied by one group get occupied by another, and the earlier memories start to change shape. What was an in-joke now becomes a solitary secret; a code no one you know now can interpret.

There’s a sorrow to that, the growing up of it all. Time slips away; eight years pass in the blink of an eye. You turn around, and you realize that the people you once talked to every day are the people you haven’t heard from in years. The happier times come up as a marker of distance, of disconnection. Depression kicks in at weird times. There’s a place you want to go, but it’s unreachable. There’s a feeling you remember like yesterday, but so long ago it’s like a story someone told you. It’s hard to have perspective. The memories… it’s all bittersweet. It’s all what isn’t, and the way it’ll never be again. The absence becomes all you can see.

But memories are about things you can’t ever lose.

The time you don’t have with someone doesn’t change the time you did have with them. The loss is only a reminder of what you had, and the value of it. A memory is proof of a thing, not the lack of it. To lash out at the world for what you can only hold in memory is to miss the joy that the memory can bring you. The friendships that change and fade are still friendships you had, friends you made. Resenting the present for not being the past is just a way of denying yourself a future.

It’s not always easy to see those memories as a source of strength. It’s easier, perhaps, to see them as a source of pain, or of sadness. But the hard work of being an adult means finding a way to push forward from a growing lifetime of memories, and find strength in both the good and the bad. Our memories are a story we tell ourselves, and we get to decide how that story makes us feel, and the part it plays in the people we are today.

We get to decide how that story ends.