Unforgiven

There was a word written on the wall at the entrance of our apartment building.

Unforgiven.

It was written in red.

I was a child, and I had no idea what it meant.

For some reason, I never asked anybody.

Maybe I was afraid that my friends would laugh at me.

Maybe I thought everybody else already knew.

There are questions like that when you are young.

You want to ask them, but asking would reveal that you do not know the answer.

So you stay silent.

The word remained there.

Unforgiven.

A mystery written on a wall.

I could have asked my father, of course.

But I can almost imagine the answer.

Something like:

“Forget about Unforgiven and go study.”

So I didn’t ask him either.

Years passed.

I forgot about the wall.

Or at least I thought I did.

Then I got into university.

My father had promised me a computer if I succeeded.

He kept his promise.

That computer became one of the most important objects in my life.

It was not simply a machine.

It was a doorway.

Until then, computers had mostly been things I saw at school, in magazines, in computer shops, or at somebody else’s house.

Now there was one on my desk.

Mine.

I could turn it on whenever I wanted.

Install things.

Break things.

Fix things.

Try again.

At university, everybody was exchanging files.

Programs.

Games.

Music.

Someone always had a CD full of something.

I started collecting music from friends.

Almost everything was new to me.

Foreign music especially.

I listened to whatever people gave me.

Rock.

Metal.

Pop.

Songs I had never heard before.

Bands whose names I barely knew.

And because disk space felt precious, deleting something should have been easy.

But I could not do it.

Even if I did not like a song, I thought:

Maybe I will like it later.

So I kept everything.

That was how we discovered things before streaming services decided what we should hear next.

Someone handed you a folder.

You copied it.

You opened files one by one.

Sometimes you found nothing interesting.

Sometimes you found something that stayed with you for the rest of your life.

Then one day I saw the name.

The Unforgiven.

For a few seconds, I just stared at it.

There it was.

The word from the wall.

The word I had carried around without even realizing that I remembered it.

Unforgiven.

Except now it was not written in red paint at the entrance of an apartment building.

It was the title of a Metallica song sitting on my computer.

I played it.

And suddenly the mystery had a sound.

That feeling is difficult to explain.

It was not only about discovering a song.

Two completely unrelated parts of my life had suddenly connected.

A wall from childhood.

A computer at university.

Years between them.

And one word.

Unforgiven.

Maybe that is why I liked the song so much from the beginning.

It arrived with a history already attached to it.

Before I knew James Hetfield.

Before I knew anything about Metallica.

Before I understood the lyrics.

Before I knew what kind of music I liked.

The title had already been waiting for me.

That is one of the strange things about memory.

We store useless details.

A word on a wall.

The color of paint.

A street.

A smell.

A sentence somebody said once.

Most of these things appear to mean nothing.

Then years later, something touches the same memory and the connection appears instantly.

You suddenly understand why your brain kept it.

The computer helped create many of those moments for me.

It changed the way I learned.

Before having one, information usually arrived in an organized form.

Books had chapters.

Teachers had lessons.

Television had schedules.

Newspapers had sections.

The computer was different.

Everything was mixed together.

Programming.

Games.

Music.

Documents.

Experiments.

Mistakes.

One minute I was trying to understand how Windows worked.

The next I was installing a program.

Then listening to a song.

Then breaking something I had no idea how to repair.

Learning became less orderly.

And much more interesting.

Music was part of that change.

For the first time, I was not limited to what television or radio happened to play.

Friends gave me things.

I found things.

One artist led to another.

Metallica led somewhere else.

That somewhere else led to another band.

My taste was being built almost accidentally.

I was also beginning to discover something important:

You do not always know immediately what you like.

Some things need time.

That was why I refused to delete songs I did not understand.

Maybe I would understand them later.

It turned out to be true more often than I expected.

The same thing happens with books.

Films.

People.

Ideas.

You meet them at the wrong time and nothing happens.

Then you return years later and suddenly they make sense.

Maybe The Unforgiven would have been just another song if somebody had played it for me years earlier.

Instead, I found it when I was beginning university, exploring my first computer, discovering foreign music, and trying to understand what kind of person I was becoming.

Timing again.

It seems to appear everywhere.

There is also something funny about the way we discover culture.

Someone had written “Unforgiven” on our apartment wall.

I do not know who.

I do not know why.

Perhaps they were a Metallica fan.

Perhaps they had just discovered the song themselves.

Perhaps they were trying to look cool.

Perhaps it had absolutely nothing to do with Metallica.

I will probably never know.

But somebody’s meaningless graffiti became part of somebody else’s memory.

Mine.

Years later, when I finally discovered the song, that anonymous person had unintentionally prepared the introduction.

I sometimes wonder how many things around us work this way.

We leave traces without knowing who will find them.

A book we lend to someone.

A song we play in a car.

A sentence we write.

A recommendation.

A word on a wall.

Most disappear.

Some continue travelling.

I had no idea at the time, but my first computer would become the place where I learned an enormous amount of what I know today.

Programming, operating systems, the Internet, music, experimentation, curiosity.

It was where I learned that pressing the wrong button was usually not the end of the world.

Most things could be repaired.

Most mistakes could be understood.

And if the operating system became completely hopeless, there was always another Windows installation.

Perhaps that is one reason computers suited me.

They rewarded curiosity.

You could ask stupid questions without being embarrassed.

You could try something simply because you wanted to know what would happen.

The machine did not laugh because you did not know what “Unforgiven” meant.

It simply played the file.

And there I was.

Years after seeing that red word on the wall.

Sitting in front of my computer.

Listening.

Mystery solved.

But something else had begun.

I had become one of those people who listened to Metallica.

And once that door opened, there was a lot more music waiting on the other side.

Sometimes discovering something new does not feel new at all.

Sometimes it feels strangely familiar.

As if it had been waiting for you.

Sometimes for years.

Sometimes on the wall of your apartment building.