Hum. What to say? Today was–a day. I woke up, ate breakfast, and spent a couple hours organizing old photos. (This project’s going to take a while.) Then I took a nap, ate dinner with my family (Mom made a roast), went for a two-hour walk, and ate again.

The end.

Really, I wish I had something more remarkable to talk about, but some days are–well–forgettable. This is something I’ve thought about during my photo organizing project. The pictures represent roughly ten years of my life, and that’s over 3,600 days. 3,600 days I woke up, did something, and went to bed. And yet SO FEW of these days stand out specifically by–well–date. I keep texting my friends asking, “What year did that happen?” Not that I don’t have hundreds of memories–I actually have pretty great recall for names, faces, events, and places–but everything is jumbled together.

For example, here’s a picture of me, my friend Justin (before he grew a beard), his brother, and their uncle when we visited Justin’s family in upstate New York. My first guess was that it was in 2003. As it turns out, it was 2009, Justin said, just before Justin and I became roommates.

Justin’s great with dates. It’s the way his mind works. I used to keep calendars, and maybe that’s why I needed them, as my brain lumps things into different, non-linear categories–people I know through dance, times I’ve visited Albuquerque, theater shows I’ve seen, or EXACTLY where I was standing whenever such-and-such happened.

I threw my old calendars away several years ago during one of my purges, but I kept wishing today that I still had them to help me label and sort my photos. For the same reason, I’ve been wishing I’d kept daily journals growing up, something like this blog. But then, really, even I wouldn’t want to go back and read them. Oh yeah, THAT was the day I had a sinus infection and ate macaroni for lunch.

Which, honestly, could have been ANY day.

As I’ve thought about it this evening, it’s occurred to me that although my brain LOVES the idea of my memories being filed away neatly by date, my body–and yours–jumbles everything together. One minute you’re right here, right now, laughing with your friends, the next minute you’re back in your childhood, that awful thing just happened, and you’re crying.

I don’t know–sometimes I look at old photos and wish I still had that outfit or that waistline. Or I wish I’d done more, done less. Taken more pictures, better pictures. Kept better records. Whatever. But this afternoon I remembered a trip to Dallas as a child and recalled exactly where I was standing when I heard “Achy Breaky Heart” by Billy Ray Cyrus. Five minutes later I was twenty years older, in upstate New York with Justin and his family, on our way to Niagara Falls. Twenty years, thirty years–what’s the difference?–it’s like it was yesterday. For these reasons, I know age, waistlines, and outfits don’t matter–because we’re so much more than anything you can keep track of with a photo or a calendar. Truly, we’re ageless. Truly, we’re timeless.