What it does to the past

There's a cost that lands on the good old days themselves, and it's the one I'd most like you to see, because the golden version is supposed to be how you keep them.

The golden version flattens. Every time you go back and the problems aren't there, the year gets a little smoother, until what you're visiting isn't a year but a poster of one. The beach, the light, the laughing. A summer that was three months long and had a hundred days in it becomes one afternoon, and the afternoon becomes an image, and the image gets thinner each time it's used, until "nineteen ninety-six" is a sentence you say rather than a place you go.

The people in it flatten too, and this is the part that should bother you. The friend on the beach was a person, with a money problem and an unrequited love and a habit of being late and a laugh you can still hear. The golden version has kept the laugh and cut the rest, and what's left isn't them. It's a prop in your picture of your own youth. The dead deserve better than to be props, and so do the living who've been edited the same way, the parents who were, that summer, tense about the car, and are remembered as a calm warm presence in a kitchen because the tension has faded and the warmth hasn't.

And the visit itself decays. Going back should be seeing an old friend. In the golden version it becomes a ritual, the same three images, the same sigh at the end, and rituals stop working. You go back more and get less, and the getting less feels like further proof that the good is gone, when what's gone is the detail, because you've been visiting a poster.

Putting the problems back restores all of this. The summer gets its hundred days again. The friend gets their money problem and their bad love affair and becomes someone you could have a conversation with, which is what you want. The parents get their tension and their bank statements and their kindness in spite of it, which is a truer and more loving picture than the calm warm kitchen. The year gets to be a year.

If the past is the thing you're trying to keep, the golden version is the wrong way to keep it. The whole record is heavier and more mixed and has things in it you'd rather not see, and it's the past, and the other thing isn't.