The Power of the Pothole

The collision of memory, sensation, and the messy truth of perception.

How we view a place is entirely dependent on our experience of it — on our relationship with it.

Imagine you’re driving through a quiet mountain town.
The skies are gray. The snow is melting. The trees stand dark green, dusted with white.
You might feel like you’ve wandered into a fairytale — that bubbling in your stomach, that feeling you can’t quite place but that reminds you of childhood somehow. You feel a little like Little Red Riding Hood stepping off the path.

Or maybe there’s an ache instead — the kind that used to show up during winter break, when the world felt unfamiliar in a soft, sparkling way. Every streetlight seems to catch and shimmer on the last clinging flecks of snow. There's a sense of calm and celebration, but muted — not loud or grand, just quietly present.

Or — you're just driving to work.
It’s the same road you take every morning. You know where the potholes are without thinking.
You’re not noticing the trees or the light. You’re thinking about bills. About how you need a new tire because of those damn potholes.

Same place, different mind.
Our emotional state, our memories, our familiarity — all of it shapes what we see, what we feel about where we are.

What’s really beautiful, though, is that sometimes — even for a heartbeat — we can trick ourselves into seeing a place as if it’s brand new.
Even just a sliver of wonder is real. Even just a flash of it counts.

Of course, it’s not an easy trick to pull off, especially when we’ve lived through change.
When a place or a feeling was real once and isn’t anymore, it’s even harder to slip back into that lost version of reality.

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Lately, we’ve been watching a lot of Black Mirror.
We binged the new season, only to realize we'd missed a few episodes from earlier ones — maybe Season 2 or 4 — or maybe we just repressed the trauma they left us with the first time. (Or, you know, maybe I was doomscrolling during an episode — a black mirror of my own life happening in real time, amirite? lol.)

One episode we hadn't seen was about a woman who accidentally kills a man — well, her boyfriend accidentally kills him, and she helps him cover it up.
Fifteen years later, the guilt comes back when the boyfriend wants to confess.
She kills him to keep the secret buried — to protect her career, her family, her version of life.

It's a dark story, obviously. A lesson in morals, sure.
But the Black Mirror twist was the technology: a device that insurance companies use to retrieve memories from witnesses.

It's not enough to ask what happened.
They need to see it — the sounds, the smells, the colors, the emotions.

In one scene, an insurance investigator visits the location of an accident — a self-driving pizza truck hitting a pedestrian — and notices a brewery nearby.
Before interviewing a witness, she brings him a beer from that brewery — not to drink, but just to smell.
The scent pulls him back into the moment with incredible clarity.
Suddenly, he’s remembering everything: the yellow of a girl’s jacket, the bright red of her lipstick, the song playing on the radio of a passing car, the pounding of his own heart.
And that memory is projected onto a tiny TV screen connected to a device on his temple.

Every sensory detail matters.
Every tiny thread of memory weaves together the experience — not just the facts, but the feeling of being there.

As the investigation unfolds, the agent layers new sensory clues from one witness to the next — the brewery smell, the music on the radio, the flash of color — and we watch how different people remember the same moment uniquely, colored by who they are, what they were doing, what the moment meant to them.
Memory isn’t objective.
It’s stitched together by smell, sound, light, emotion — and it changes from person to person.

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In a way, it’s exactly what I was thinking about on my drive to work this morning.
That bubbling fairytale feeling.
That aching winter break melancholy.
That exhausted, pothole-filled commute.

All the same place.
Different memories, different minds, different versions of reality.

Perception is relational.
Memory is fragile, but powerful.
And maybe — just maybe — the ability to glimpse an old magic, to trick ourselves back into wonder, even for a heartbeat, is a small act of hope against the cynicism we so easily fall into.

Maybe it’s not about recreating the past exactly.
Maybe it’s about letting ourselves feel it again — not as it was, but as it still can be, even for a moment.

And isn’t that what storytelling is?