Scrubbing clothes in the rain yesterday did me in. I spent today rolling around in bed trying to sweat a fever out and watching YouTube videos in desperate hope of learning something about pop culture. I learnt about queefing, Netflix-and-chill and the orgasm inducing mushrooms. Pop culture scares me.

It rained most of today. This morning it was beautiful. I love the way everything turns grey and cold and beautiful in a subdued sort of way. It’s like seeing a whole new world in a place where you’re accustomed to sharp, hot light making everything too vivid.

I spend a lot of my social time in one particular Whatsapp group. This morning one of my friends said that his grandmother’s fireside was the warmest place in Mahaicony on a rainy day and that sent us down memory lane. He shared his memories of hot chotah sprinkled with sugar and how his grandfather would say “this kiss-meh-ass boy” when he didn’t milk the cows right.

I’m just a few years younger than he is but I don’t have those sort of memories of my grandparents. By the time I was old enough to know them they had moved from the back-house where the cows and chickens were, to the front house with the shop that sold everything from a bag of rice to an ounce of nut butter.

When I consider the sort of memories we all have and I look at us and who we are now and what we do, I begin to understand what time does to us. There’s no telling what 2 or 5 or 12 years will do, where it will take us and what we’ll lose. I’m happy we didn’t lose these memories. I’m happy that the old world still lives in our hearts and our words.

Tonight, I was going through the pictures of my Whatsapp contacts. It’s a mindless habit I’ve developed and it helps me keep in touch with people’s lives. I saw a picture of my friend laugh-kissing his wife at his 30^th birthday party. It was a perfect imperfect moment captured and frozen in time. I hope they’ll be able to look at that ten years from now and remember the good things, the things worth remembering while we deal with the mundane duties of life.

Netflix-and-chill, stew, who came up with that shit? I wonder what my partner would say if I looked at him and said “hey baby, wanna Netflix-and-chill?” Pop culture seems to suck the romance out of life sometimes. Or maybe I just don’t get it. For now, I’m off to bed.