Some memories stick because in the moment, you thought, I have to remember this. You were caught somewhere without a camera, so you had to depend on your memory to hold an image and a feeling.
Road wet from the rain, white paint washed bright in the lamplight, somewhere a fork of lightning, and you on your bike finishing a lap around Central Park in a thunderstorm. You were alone and felt new.
You wonder if it was better in those first few weeks, back when the City was unfamiliar. Before you had convenient routes and comfortable routines that your footprints sank into. You remember that summer afternoon in that part of the City you have never found since, the day you took a sandwich and a bottle of pomegranate juice and a quarter-finished book to the stoop of a brownstone. You didn't read the book, and while you wondered idly if the brownstone's resident would emerge to ask you to leave, you looked up at the sun through the patchwork canopy of leaves.
You weren't as busy the summer after that. You spent hours in the park, lying on your stomach with a new computer and a new idea for a story. You spent more time watching the clouds. You didn't think of what they resembled, because you never got past being happy you had the time to watch the clouds. You had a plastic container of red grapes by your elbow and another bottle of pomegranate juice. The sweet tang of both melted down your throat as you listened to a song by a band you don't listen to very much anymore.
One night, you remember, you were in your dorm room. It was meant for two people, but that summer you had it to yourself. Even though you didn't realize at the time how happy you were, you had an inkling. You turned off all the lights and stood at the window to watch the lightning play over the spires of the skyline. An illuminated sign in Times Square stuck out from the gloom like the folded corner of a bookmarked page. You were listening to a song sung in a language you didn't understand at the time. You decided on that song because its sound enhanced the buoyancy of the moment. You don't think it could ever work as well again with another moment. Some songs are like that.
Some memories don't need to be photographed, as long as they're remembered.
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