Somewhere in a box in a storage unit in NYC is stored a collection of moments caught on actual photo stock from back in the day—the nineties, to be exact—when pictures weren’t captured, then stored, in a virtual photo album. There were no Google memories from five years ago flagging me down on my device to tell me “Hey, remember this?” I’ve suffered some losses around these tactile photos (who hasn’t, really?). The most extreme of these misplacements was when I moved in with Dennis eleven years ago and a plastic bin of Polaroids taken during a tour I was on with Pearl Jam went missing…okay, didn’t go missing, I put the wrong container into the dumpster, then didn’t realize until months later. I still get all ooky in my gut about that fumble. There is no cloud they ever lived on except the one in my mind. I can recreate the images in my head, I just can’t actually hold them in my hand.

But a good portion of non-kodachrome, live-only-in-my-mind memories are hazy, personally shaded and highly unreliable. Tinted with time and emotional egress depending on where I’m standing to look at them. I just finished Candy House by Jennifer Egan (friggin’ beyond the valley of good) and in it there is a virtual service called Own Your Unconscious wherein you can download your past to access and view, guaranteeing that any and all moments can be revisited like a home movie. It’s an idea I’ve no doubt is being (or has been being) worked on and developed in a tech complex currently and will be ready for primetime any year now. As much as I might wonder about why certain swathes of my past are just gray fog where I have literally no discernible shape around a particular event, I think it would be weird to have something all laid out for viewing that would strip away all the blurred edges. Blur can be useful, make for better stories. Or maybe just continue a storyline I’ve been telling with only traces of truth. I don’t know.

When I think about the box of photos sitting in that NYC storage unit, there’s one I’m sure is in there: It’s 1994 and a group of young women in very short, glittering, somewhat see-through, silver dresses all slanting slightly sideways because of the towering beehives coming off our heads are posing in a sassy girl-power kind of way—arms around each other, big smiles as wide as the hair is tall, knees crooked as if we’re on the verge of kicking out a chorus line. We’re minutes away from walking down the aisle as bridesmaids for Amanda Scheer during her wedding to Ted Demme. I remember nothing of the walk down the aisle or the ceremony itself. It was at a church filled with lots of at-the-time A and B (plus C and on into the alphabet) music and film folks so no doubt the air was buzzy. I have a vague memory of dancing crazy at the reception, which maybe was held next door to where the ceremony was? Literally no memory around that. My sharpest moment is the next morning when I was forced to soak my head for a very very long time in my bathtub to get out the aqua net used to shellac my beehive into a standing position (I had a lot of hair back in the day). That is my most vivid flashback of the event. I kept the dress in the back of a drawer until we moved to the west coast two years ago because … honestly, I have no idea why except that I felt it held some marker of memory. Or maybe I thought by keeping it, more memories might surface like a Proustian madeleine. But they never did and I finally gave the thing away since I recognized I was well beyond ever actually wearing it again, even as a shirt.

As my memories of things past (or passed) float and crumble (for instance, no idea what specifically was happening or when in the photo above except that it was, er, the nineties), I’ve been writing things down. In this blog for instance. And the more I unearth, the more thoughts do come. I definitely can let go of being overly worried about their precision although I do go out of my way to confirm certain dates and things when I can. Otherwise, these are my memories not often backed up by tangible photos and they bring all sorts of rollercoaster rides.

I named this post Sorrow and Bliss because I thought I was headed in another direction around loss and love, having been reminded of how those things are twinned after hearing of the death of the husband of a woman I was very close to many years ago. We shared a lot of important moments, then drifted into other places in our lives. Ted Demme also died some years after he and Amanda were married. By that time I had lost touch with her and except for one of the women in that bridesmaid group, I’d also moved (emotionally) away from them. Thinking about it now, these moments all thread together as one fantastic quilt of stuff. There are some holes, so maybe it’s instead a loose-knit throw to shrug on when I’m in the mood. All the colors, the lights, darks, sharps, dulls, faded and fine. Balls of yarn that keep getting pulled.

• great book Sorrow and Bliss