not just something in my eye

For all the mind-baggage we generate there are always going to be some which stick around more than others, some you're glad are only memories or some you're glad happened at all; they could be a single moment, a single day, a week... of a person or many people... associated with a specific event or a general time of year or a specific location or a general area...

As I've gradually changed and expanded my range over the years I've lived up here there are are some particular areas which I particularly associate with particular memories or sets of memories. Some of the walks home (at night, alone) from twelve or thirteen years ago are particularly associated with particular areas or (in a couple of particular cases) with specific routes down specific streets which always bring themselves to mind when I walk down them in the present. It's partly for this reason that I make sure I walk down them reasonably regularly; exercising memories is possibly a way of helping to prevent them from being forgotten (and as each memory launches a series of others remembering one thing may help reinforce a whole bunch) but each time I remember some of the more difficult things they get easier to remember in the context of how I am now compared to how I was then. They don't carry the weight they once did but I can still feel and heft the weight they once had; I can support it much more easily. I'm not sure I'd be entirely comfortable with leaving them and almost-forgetting them for a longer period only to walk down there one day and suddenly feel them all again; even though who I am is the end result of everything I've ever felt who I was then is the result of what I was feeling at the time, hence the extra blinking if I have too long a run-up to walking down that road late at night.