My mom sent me the home videos on Whatsapp, as I had requested. Each of them shakily extracted from her archaic Samsung TFT Color with her iPhone camera. I guess I thought they would be good for my Visual Studies final, talking about my immigrant roots or whatever. Those seemed to get the best grades.
The videos came to me in waves--5:48, 1:24, 1:09, 5:02--a heavily rewatched montage of my first day in preschool. I wondered if my mom had filmed it in bits because her wrist was getting tired. My father, smiling with his square jaw and overbite, whisking me away to school bouncing on his left forearm. Then there were others--6:29 (me being pushed around Orchard Road in a stroller) and 0:23 (me, around 4, in a department store). I sat in the back of this bus watching, lurching over speed bumps from the 22nd Street to 4th Street Caltrain station.
I crossed plain after plain of cloud software billboards, ExxonMobils, dented white Teslas, a dry vastness that seemed inbetween light khaki and mustard. The videos my mom sent were all silent, but I was hesitant about troubling her with the task of re-recording all of them with sound. For me, there was virtually nothing to listen to, aside from this big bus grazing over asphalt, and some person’s Instagram reel in the distance. I watched and re-watched all of the home videos, except “Christmas2005.svi”, which my mom had to email me because it was corrupt. When I tried decoding it on my Macbook, this file flickered in grey bursts. It was all nothingness, an esoteric brutalism.
It was a true Ghost in the Machine moment. What exactly was on this video, and why couldn’t I access it? Did the moment exist if nobody remembers it? “Christmas2005.svi” left me with profound abysses in my understanding of time and existence.
Most of all, I felt sorely left out. I wonder what had been seen through my parents’ tired eyes, through the mechanical chirp of a digital camera, through the burr of my mom’s old media player. I simply don’t remember. All these entities had bore witness to me, which I could never access, even if I synthetically downloaded them into my brain by watching them. It was like Christmas 2005 had existed for everyone but me.
What do I remember of 2005? It was a good year, as I had topped my cohort in Mathematics and English. It was also the year my now-estranged father gifted me my first present. The white snow globe was only about three inches wide, but it weighed a lot for an eight year-old. It felt expensive. I received it on my birthday, beaming on my parent’s bed as I watched the plastic confetti waft across the snowman, weightless. As if floating in space, this gift, and its giver’s sentiment of love, was salient throughout my parents’ innumerable conflicts. This old vignette finally shattered the day I picked glass shards out of my toes. It cut way more deeply than I had expected.
The videos came to me in waves--5:48, 1:24, 1:09, 5:02--a heavily rewatched montage of my first day in preschool. I wondered if my mom had filmed it in bits because her wrist was getting tired. My father, smiling with his square jaw and overbite, whisking me away to school bouncing on his left forearm. Then there were others--6:29 (me being pushed around Orchard Road in a stroller) and 0:23 (me, around 4, in a department store). I sat in the back of this bus watching, lurching over speed bumps from the 22nd Street to 4th Street Caltrain station.
I crossed plain after plain of cloud software billboards, ExxonMobils, dented white Teslas, a dry vastness that seemed inbetween light khaki and mustard. The videos my mom sent were all silent, but I was hesitant about troubling her with the task of re-recording all of them with sound. For me, there was virtually nothing to listen to, aside from this big bus grazing over asphalt, and some person’s Instagram reel in the distance. I watched and re-watched all of the home videos, except “Christmas2005.svi”, which my mom had to email me because it was corrupt. When I tried decoding it on my Macbook, this file flickered in grey bursts. It was all nothingness, an esoteric brutalism.
It was a true Ghost in the Machine moment. What exactly was on this video, and why couldn’t I access it? Did the moment exist if nobody remembers it? “Christmas2005.svi” left me with profound abysses in my understanding of time and existence.
Most of all, I felt sorely left out. I wonder what had been seen through my parents’ tired eyes, through the mechanical chirp of a digital camera, through the burr of my mom’s old media player. I simply don’t remember. All these entities had bore witness to me, which I could never access, even if I synthetically downloaded them into my brain by watching them. It was like Christmas 2005 had existed for everyone but me.
What do I remember of 2005? It was a good year, as I had topped my cohort in Mathematics and English. It was also the year my now-estranged father gifted me my first present. The white snow globe was only about three inches wide, but it weighed a lot for an eight year-old. It felt expensive. I received it on my birthday, beaming on my parent’s bed as I watched the plastic confetti waft across the snowman, weightless. As if floating in space, this gift, and its giver’s sentiment of love, was salient throughout my parents’ innumerable conflicts. This old vignette finally shattered the day I picked glass shards out of my toes. It cut way more deeply than I had expected.