The other day I was watching some home movies. If I stop my tale here, I’m likely to evoke the typical heart-warming experience: family members gathered around to re-create their shared past. The laughter at seeing old styles of clothes, hairdos, eyeglasses; the deep welcoming of the old/wildly young version of ourselves and our loved ones; the awe at seeing today’s grown-ups toddling then running then hopping then twirling and refusing to do what they’re asked because someone’s filming; the mystification of how much time has passed since our once-young selves were smug and all-knowing; the wistfulness for the lost bits of youth and beauty which memory doesn’t preserve quite as well as the videos do; and perhaps even the sadness at revisiting relatives who have since passed away.
But my tale is about watching someone else’s home movies.
I only know these people as adults, and some of them I’ve only met in their late life. We have few shared experiences, and not a single one from a time when our pasts overlapped, let alone being captured on video. There’s no one who looks like me in any frame, no old furniture that reminds me of my grandparents’ home, no cute bits with my old dog, no funny shots of me or the dance costumes my Mom sewed or my brother’s little league uniforms, it’s not my bedspread under the feet of the jumping kids, there’s no bad wood paneling in the family room. My family, my parents, my grandparents, our memories, our stories, our life . . . absent.
Even though I knew I wasn’t in these videos, knew I was watching as a way to be a good sport and join the family as they were doing this important part of their family celebration, I was surprised at how sad I felt. How much of an outsider I am to this group to whom I usually think I now belong. Fragments of jealousy, but I’m not sure of what I was jealous. I didn’t want or miss the times in these movies, as they were never mine. Nothing in my life is absent just because I watched other peoples’ memories unfold.
Home videos are usually reserved for relatives. With others, we encounter their past through stories; it’s in the recounting of history that a newcomer begins to participate. Not participate in the memory, as that’s impossible. But participate in knowing a person through the way the story is told, the reflections made about the story with the new person, the way we choose which bits of our history to share and when, based on how we think it will enhance a relationship or understanding now. By sharing a story, I join an “us” with my friend; by watching passively as moments of another’s life unfold on a screen, I remain a “them” and cannot cross the divide.
Perhaps this was just a moment of heightened existential isolation. Two people on a date have totally different experiences (until they create one story about it and then share that story and keep their individual experiences separately tucked away). Eyewitness testimony shows us that no one event is experienced the same way by more than one person. Our sensory data are different, the meaning we attribute to it is different, and even the emotional aspect of the experience differs. Usually, watching home videos creates a powerful sense of belonging – we belonged to one another then, and we belong to one another now – and creates another memory to be woven into the tapestry of the family unit.
I was quiet, a bit withdrawn, during the movies, and careful not to sully the experience for others. I felt torn from my past, but also torn from the present. I wasn’t part of the “we belong to each other” moments, and no one even knew how to invite me in – they were so clearly nourished by the experience they didn’t (and probably now, couldn’t) imagine that their need to belong pressed me to the outside.
Driving home, I still felt out of sorts. I was re-entering my life, but from a very far distance travelled. I was across a divide that I usually forget exists. But by writing to the reader, some of whom are dear friends, I will cross the divide and weave this story into one I can share. I will belong to my friends and share my experience with them, and they’ll share their stories with a similar theme (maybe not exactly about home movies, but some time when they’ve been isolated and alone at a moment when no one else noticed), and I’ll be back from the brink of existential separation, back again in the warm hub of belonging to the people in my life.