The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past

by Nate DiMeo

There is no map that can lead you out of such grief. That is the way of grief. One gropes until there is light. There is no way of knowing the territory a dream occupies within you until you feel the contours of its absence.

Your parents would die, your child would grow, your wedding day would come and go, as well as your home, your dearest friend, that person you loved but were never quite brave enough to tell, and all the places and people you left behind as you lived your life—and for all of human history, the only lifelike images you would have had of them would have been in your head, and for only as long as you were able to hold them there. And then you could take a picture.

They were just one of a million things. But they were the most beautiful.

I do regret it. I don’t regret it at all. That is how life goes.

I have assumed that it was taken on a day my grandmother had told me about: One summer afternoon they went to the beach, took this photo, and on the way home, they squeezed into the back of their friend’s car, where she sat in his lap in the back, sandy and sun-kissed, and she knew for sure that she loved him. If this photograph is, in fact, from that day, what a thing it is—taken at a time when cameras weren’t ubiquitous, when their successful operation wasn’t guaranteed, when each picture cost money that maybe you didn’t have. How remarkable to have a document of this particular day, one that would be recalled and treasured out of thousands. The start of decades of love, whatever that meant, however it changed over time, however compromised it may have been, however long-suffering or not, however simply true. What are the odds? Or maybe it wasn’t quite like that. Maybe she remembered it this way because she had this photograph. Maybe it represented some warm, half-recalled feeling from a time long ago and the photo crystallized it, turned it into a story. I never asked her about it. I don’t think it matters. Growing up, that picture looked like love itself to me.

I want to conjure the magic that lies in the liminal spaces between the plot points in people’s lives.

And this thing my mom once saw on TV snapped something into place for me. I had spent so much of the however many months since I’d gotten out of the hospital looking for the dimes upon which life turns, finding them in its traumas and terrors and times when things fall apart. And here I was having my life changed—in a real way that has stayed with me to this day, and that has, if not set the course of my life, set a lens through which I have seen life as I have moved through it—by a conversation with my mom about a morning show segment I didn’t even watch.

these things that are happening all around us, all the time, if we just stopped to notice them as they happened and remember them when they were done. I set out to do that: to notice and to remember. And to remember, you need a story.