I know a place we can go where you'll fall in love so hard you'll wish you were dead

Memory changes as time goes on. Memories become more distant, just as vivid but inaccessible. Perception of memories becomes different with change of context, past perception of the future is more reflection of the past than what the present would actually turn out to be. Physical parts of memories – people, places, are still there, but not the version/context from memory.

When you're 12, all memory seems within reach. Up until about age six, most of your memories are a hazy patchwork of remembered events or ones constructed from things you are told you have done but may or may not actually remember; birthdays, Christmas, skinning your knee, watching cartoons. So by age 12 you essentially have six years of solid memories, and although there are many changes between ages six and 12, they all happen within the same daily context of going to school, playing with friends, and living at home. For most people, there are still another six years until that context will change at age 18. Although you know that everything from age six to 12 has already happened, you can expect to continue experiencing things in the same way for the next few years at least – Christmas at 10 is not so different from Christmas at 12 or 13, nor is going to school or eating dinner with your family.

By age 23 you have nearly doubled your altitude in time and all of a sudden age six looks incredibly far away – memories now populated by ant-sized people which are viewable from the precipice on which you stand but out of physical reach. On the mountain of time one can always look back down, but physical movement can only go forward and upward. Life starts at the bottom, a sort of base camp, but the further one gets, the rockier and thicker the terrain gets, sometimes in a way that makes it hard to traverse, other times in a new way you never would have expected or imagined but that is intriguing and enjoyable nonetheless.

This experience of seeing the past from such a great height all of a sudden can be jarring. Up until age 18 or so, life goes on at a steady, even pace, along a shallow incline. But at age 18, or whenever one becomes an adult and moves away from the context of family and school to independence and adulthood the trajectory becomes steeper, but you are so intent to climb up it as fast as you can, excited to get to the next level, that you don't look around you and see how quickly you are moving up, until you find yourself standing on that precipice looking back down at all the time you've covered. Seeing how far you have gotten is not the only thing that makes this experience jarring; it is compounded by the fact that that distance creates a barrier in one's memory which, until this point, could not have existed because there was not enough time between memories to create one. Christmas at 10, 12 and 13 may be a predictable experience, reinforced and confirmed by past memories and expectations for the immediate future, but Christmas at 23 is an entirely different and new experience, one that is different in a way from those previous Christmas's in a way you didn't realize it could be.

At 13 you can experience the same joy and excitement about Christmas that you could at nine. You have this excitement and joy because you remember having had that feeling before, and you live more or less in the same environment in which you previously experienced it, so naturally it would be as consistent as the rest of your experiences that are shaped by expectation from recent memories. At 23, however, the barrier of memory-distance stands between you and that feeling. You can remember what it felt like, you can observe and recognize the same sentiment in others, but you can't actually experience it again. Of course this barrier isn't all of a sudden put up one day, barring you from your previous experiences. It is built slowly, at a pace at which one barely notices its construction. It's simply that you don't realize it's there until it's built up all the way. By 16 or 17 it is already halfway built, so when you do something you have done before there is an aspect of newness in your experience of it, but there is still some of the old as well, and so you don't recognize the new as something that will eventually replace the old as your primary experience, but something that is being added on to it. While the “you” of the present looks at it as a combination of present and past memories, your subconscious is quietly removing the bottom bricks of the wall you've always known and moving them away into storage.

This isn't to say that once that wall is built up you are stuck on one side with no new experiences or memories looking back at a forbidden greener-grassed past. New memories are still always forming, although there is now a tinge of bittersweetness in experiencing them, because you know that eventually these memories will be behind another wall. This bittersweetness is a good and bad thing. On the one hand, it can make you nostalgic for your experiences in the present, saddened by the knowledge that they will soon be gone, but on the other hand, it forces you to appreciate your experiences as much as you can in the moment, squeezing out all the joy you can from the fleeting present.

Memory is funny because while it exists entirely in your head, the majority of things that trigger memories exist in the external world, but there is no way to physically reconcile your memories with what you see in the external world in the present. This morning when I walked from my house to the Ave, a six block walk along 45th, I crossed through a lifetime of memories. I walk past the Metro theater and I'm eleven years old again, waiting in line with my grandpa to see a movie, holding his hand and looking up at him excitedly from my younger stature, or I'm 19, on a date, nervously standing in line absentmindedly folding and unfolding a 20 dollar bill and trying to think of something clever or witty to say. But I pass it and I am 23, on my way to work – a new experience that is still populated by transparent wisps of memory replaying themselves over and over like holographic movies. Everything I encounter is Proust's madeleine.

The memory-distance barrier not only changes how we look at the past, but also the present and future. Many of our experiences in the present are things that we imagined in the past, especially our broader and more encompassing experiences such as work, home life, friendships, hobbies, etc. In our memory there is a distinct image of what the future would be, and most often it is the case that the future is not what we imagined it to be, but rather that that fantasy of the future was a projection of our lives at the time of the memory onto a skeletal view of what the future would be - for example, work is the skeletal frame, but the rest of the body is the content and experience of work; the soul the imagined future of work and the flesh the reality.

Of course this analogy applies not only to work, but to almost all our experiences. When I was 17 I knew exactly what my apartment would look like and where it would be at age 23. My imagined future was shaped by my interests at the time, but not particularly by a realistic idea of the future. At the time I had started watching the show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and ascribed religiously to its aesthetics and its version of what a classy, cultured man should be like. So I imagined my home would be like the ones they created on the show, but not just in how it was decorated, but where it was, what floor it was on, what view it had. I was also becoming more and more interested in cooking, particularly Japanese, and so I imagined my home would be equipped with all the necessary tools for cooking mostly Japanese food, the pantry stocked with imported ingredients, etc. In my free time I would write and read in a way at the time I couldn't really imagine, but I knew that it would be superior to the way I did it then. Some of these things came true. Others never really had anything to do with the future, and realized their full potential in the past (when I was 17 and had no need for it I used lotion and moisturizers to keep my skin supple, when I was 22 and working in a professional kitchen, my skin being assaulted by a barrage of detrimental substances, I ignored it and let the damage go untreated because the fantasy of perfect skin was no longer relevant in the reality of kitchen work which left no time for aesthetic worries, and furthermore was too exhausting to even try to make them a priority). In none of these things did I factor in the element of money, or of finding and getting the perfect job that would frame all this, nor did I factor in the increased load of responsibilities that would come with entering the "real world," and like the exhaustion of the kitchen, make most of my 17 year old fantasy impractical. Of course some of these things came true, but not in ways I had expected them to come true. Others came true maybe only because the soul of their memory was stronger than the flesh of reality within their skeletal frame; I had wanted so badly for them to be true that I made it so, even if it was impractical for them to be true. I needed to realize them regardless to somehow not let down the former me. My imagined wine collection turned out to be more cheap empty bottles in the recycle than expensive ones in the temperature controlled room (although I still bought the expensive ones, but half the time they were drunk as quickly and callously as the cheap ones). My bedroom is full of books, but I still have the same bookshelf I've had since I was 16, and now it's falling apart. I've become a much better writer than I was then, but not in the capacity of a well known food writer, but a struggling (but satisfied) writer on a blog whose sole readers are the author's parents.

Not only material things, idea of self changing but who you are is rooted in you, personality can't change and idea of future (including material things) is reflection of personality, so impossible.

These projections of past memory of future still effect our present because what we based our plans for future on is not true, is different, and also serves to illustrate the gap and time passed in memory.