WHEN I was a kid, I used to play the memory game with my lolo and lola.
The game consists of laying out a deck of cards face down and randomly lining up the cards in rows and columns so that no one knows where each card is. Each turn, a player flips two cards—one after the other—trying to draw two of the same kind. With each flip of a card, the players begin to learn and remember where certain cards are located so that when they flip one they recognize, they know where its pair is. The player with the most pairs by the end of the game is declared the winner.
As I sat on their bed matching cards with them, lola and lola would tell me stories about their lives—stories like lolo breaking his thumb with a knife, or lola making toys out of matchboxes with her 11 other siblings.
Eventually, I outgrew this phase. As I got older, most of my time was spent going to friends’ houses, attending football practice, studying for school, and going to parties. I went from playing memory games to living in the moment. That was how I wanted to live: Enjoying the present rather than worrying about the future or reminiscing about the past. Why talk about a memory when you could create a new one? When every day is guaranteed to present something new, it gets easy to live with that mindset.
It was only during the pandemic when I realized once again the importance of recollection. In those periods where life feels paused—like I’m stuck in the present, bored with what it has to offer—I can lean on the past to bring back a feeling of better days.
Now, I flip open a card and match it with the corresponding events that come rushing back. I watch a football game and I’m taken back to the days where football took up half my life. I go through old Snaps and I’m suddenly back with my friends reliving the most entertaining moments that we somehow caught on camera. But the thing with this game is that when you pick up a card, its matching memory isn’t always the happiest one.
Lolo died in April of 2019, and I still see things that remind me of him. My photos walking with him in Spain show up when I go through my gallery. His cologne that lola gave me now sits on my desk. The countless Hawaiian polo shirts that he loved to wear now hang in my closet and my brothers’ closets. The book I took with me to the hospital the day he died still lies around my house, its pages holding themes of coming-of-age and death that somehow paralleled what was about to happen. The shirt I wore that night still finds its way in and out of my closet, now without a trace of the tears that once soaked it.
I volunteered to keep him company in the hospital that night, but his condition reached a point where everyone chose to stay until he passed. As I sat there bawling, I found it impossible to live in the moment. Instead, my mind flashed back to the times when life was easier—like those nights he told me his stories or those trips we always made to his farm.
Whether it’s a focal point as significant as lolo or as superficial as those young, reckless moments with friends, there’s something quite bittersweet about my memories. These snapshots of the past are pleasing to relive and simultaneously painful to recall, but maybe that’s why I need them: To remind me of lolo or of instances in my life when everything was all about that exact moment.
Although the cards are different now and the deck is perpetually expanding, I still play the memory game. When the present gets unbearable and I find myself fading in the moment rather than living in it, all I do is flip open a card and the memories come rushing back like a reinvigorating spark.
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