Yesterday I checked-in on swarm (yes I still use that app) at Loft, and the app reminded me that I was last there in 2018 with my partner:
I had zero recollection that I had ever been there. What was immediately poignant was that there is data of my partner’s presence with me, all the way back in 2018. 2018 feels like eons ago, yet in some ways it still feels recent. Like many people, 2020-2023 just felt like a black hole.
In 2018 we were in tokyo for just a night while enroute to kyoto. Out of curiosity I went to look at the photos I took:
There we were, still fresh faced and somewhat carrying some innocence. We’ve been talking a lot about ageing lately: from our worsening eyesight to our fluctuating body temperatures in perimenopause. How the pandemic has changed the both of us. How we took it slow in kyoto back then because we felt like we had time, how every trip now is frenetic because we have no idea when our world is going to change dramatically again.
Even back then in 2018 I felt the urgency of impermanence, so I kept trying to tick off my bucket list while I could. Kyoto was one of those place I felt we had to go. Only on hindsight in 2025 I am glad we made it then. Now we can no longer feel as free, the weight on both of our souls have dramatically shifted, and we can no longer eat indoors (I love to eat, so this is a huge loss for me).
For adhd people there is a concept called body doubling, where just getting another person present with us will make completing tasks much easier. Having my partner is like being in permanent body doubling mode. Life and existence are both difficult for me. My partner makes everything more tolerable. There are many things that are easy for other people to do but difficult for me. She understands this and supports me in the ways she can. Early on in our relationship I told her I want to spend my prime years travelling as much as I can because I am not sure how long I would live or when I’ll be called to fulfil other responsibilities. Hence she has just been here with me: going to places I want to go, doing the things I wish to do. She knows what I lack and she is the only person in this world that not only does not hold this lack against me, she holds and nourishes it. I have been living like a person on a borrowed timeline, and again she is the only person who honours it instead of mocking or dismissing it.
Seeing the pop-up from swarm, it occurred to me the extensive amount of memories we have built together. Wherever I have been, she was there with me. My memories are essentially hers and vice versa. We are able to fill gaps in each other’s memories. My life is basically hers. It isn’t all sunshine and unicorns of course. We annoy each other with our own quirks. We remember all the terrible things about each other. There is a ton of intimate information we have of each other that can be weaponised against the other. A relationship is a continuous elaborate dance between two people. Sometimes it feels like how can it be so easy! Other days it feels like this is impossible.
Yet like some miracle, after 114 months we are still together. Because our younger selves treated our time together as precious, we took a ton of photos and documented a ton of our time together. 114 months later with the knowledge I’ve acquired between then and now, I am so glad that my younger self was able to see ahead of time, sensing the sacredness of impermanence. That was how and why we are able to build this repository of memories, and it serves as such a deep reserve for our ongoing relationship, and for enduring future times.
What a wonderful thing it is to be known so deeply and widely, to remember and to be remembered so intimately – all in the process of ageing together.
