While working for my minor in English Literature back in college, I had to read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway twice. Some people found the novel quite boring since all it did was focus on a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway. But I liked it because focusing on just one day magnified so many moments that people would normally take for granted in their own daily lives. Taking a moment and magnifying it to bring out certain truths and insights has been something I’ve tried to do with my own writing.

But more than just being a “moment writer” –as I like to call it—I’ve realized that this is the way I think as well. I could be looking at a whole array of objects in a room, zero in on one object, then have a whole string of memories attached to that one object. Sometimes I think it’s akin to what Milan Kundera calls poetic memory, where certain objects could mean different things for different people.

When I see a downpour, I’m taken back to the time when my blockmates and I decided to have lunch in Eastwood, even if there was a Storm Signal Number 3. Because of the heavy rain and strong winds, we ran the short distance from Something Fishy to Pho Hoa without umbrellas and got drenched in the process. We entered Pho Hoa like a bunch of crazy drowned rats, and we didn’t care that people were looking at us as we laughed our heads off and dripped all over the floor. And seeing the rain brings back that memory of a day when I adopted the devil-may-care attitude I so rarely adopt, and it is a memory that makes me smile.

In the months nearing summer, I find myself looking at the trees and thinking, “Wow, the trees are a different shade of green again.” And I am transported back to the Ateneo, where boredom would incite senseless arguments on how the greenness of the trees change as the year wears on. I usually argue with a guy on this, since green to them is the green that comes in Crayola’s Box of 8. My knowledge of green is more on the Box of 64 level. And so we argue on how I could say that in December, the leaves are bordering on Pine Green, while March means they’re right about the shade of Yellow Green. We could sometimes take the argument on an international level by arguing that the shades of green in the Philippines are way different from the shades of green in America, but that’s a whole different argument. Seeing the leaves brings me back to a time when I didn’t quite take myself so seriously that I could argue about shades of green with a passion, even if the argument doesn’t really bring world peace or anything.

And sometimes, when I listen to the radio, an entire playlist can trigger memories that are in no way connected to one another. The Corrs’ At Your Side makes me think of a high school, when I used to jam with my seatmate instead of cramming our Trigonometry homework. Then King and Queen of Hearts will play and I scoff at the thought of how this song somehow works itself into every Prom Playlist, no matter what generation. Follow it up with Edwin McCain’s I’ll Be, and I smile at how I always thought of this song as very overplayed and overrated, until it was sung to me as a harana after Valentine’s Day and I realized just how perfect the lyrics were coming from my beloved. As random as the songs on the radio, so are the thoughts that fly through my head with each song.

That’s just the way I am: random thoughts that pop into my head, triggered by any one of my four senses. It’s funny because sometimes I think, “So what does this say about me? Is there any significance to these memories?” And it can be frustrating when the answer is, “Nothing. It doesn’t say much about you, and there’s no significance to these memories. There is no deeper meaning of life.” Because somehow, I strive for meaning. I wish that these thoughts could be more connected, more coherent, so that they could tell me what kind of person I am for having such memories, for retaining such senseless things that, to my twisted logic, are somehow important and valuable. Not having a sense of coherence in my thoughts makes me feel like I have no coherence as a person as well. That somehow, my fragmented thoughts hint at a broken person that cannot be fixed unless these fragmented thoughts find coherence.

I don’t know why we have an instinct to try and establish order in our lives. Is it because that’s supposedly the natural way of the world? That out of chaos came order? Why do we feel a need to label anything unfamiliar, to define anything that hasn’t yet been defined, to fix anything that has been broken? In short, I wonder why I can’t let my fragmented thoughts stay that way, and I wonder what’s wrong with being a broken person.

In reality, I love that my mind wanders the way it does. Sometimes I start thinking about what bottle of shampoo to buy, then I remember a popular shampoo commercial, then I think of how my hair can never be worthy of being in a shampoo commercial, so maybe I should just cut my hair like Ashley Judd’s, then I think of Ashley Judd’s new movie. Finding the degrees of separation between what shampoo to buy and Ashley Judd’s new movie would be a challenge for anyone else but me, so maybe that thought pattern makes me uniquely my own person.

Besides, having my mind flit from one thought to another totally unrelated thought leaves so much room for creativity and growth. How boring it would be to have my thoughts logically lead from one point to another. How disinteresting life would be if there was only one road that led from one point to another, and there was no room for any detours. Scary as it may seem, taking a wrong turn leads to new discoveries and new experiences, just as my mind takes certain detours to find itself with thoughts I never quite knew existed in the recesses of my mind.

So maybe, there’s something about having fragmented thoughts that stem from selective memory. Because each memory that somehow works itself to the surface of my mind is special in its own way, magnified to greater proportions, before disappearing to give space to yet another thought, another moment, a stream of consciousness that not everyone can understand nor appreciate.