
I love to explore my memories, trying to once again regain some sense of the reality associated with those experiences, or those thoughts, or those emotions. Some memories seem more like daydreams, surrounded in a hazy fog of thought. Others though are more tangent, like an experience that occurred no more than an hour ago, regardless of how many years have actually passed since the scenery and interactions became immortalized in my mind. An innumerable amount of memories, and various different ways to uniquely explore them all. I’m sure everyone does this at some point, going back to one of those memories that still hold meaning in their mind, and just examining them. I tend to do this much more than I should though, I believe. Perhaps I’m just frequently introspective, or rather hopelessly sentimental. Maybe my detailed memory has something to do with it…since I do tend to remember just about everything that happens to me, even those things I wish I could forget. Surely everyone has memories they wish they couldn’t remember?
Aside from not wanting to remember things, there is the habit that people have of forgetting things. This doesn’t happen to me very often though, strangely enough. If someone’s talking to me and I’ve forgotten what it was they said to me earlier, that generally implies I wasn’t ever really paying attention, not that I’ve actually forgotten it. But everyone forgets things at some point or another. Answers to questions on a midterm, or where you left your keys after coming in from a busy day. But what about people? About names? About actions? About your relationships and your joint experiences?
I can say with assurance I’ve never forgotten about anyone I’ve been close to. But I’m sure lots of people who “aren’t good with names” do forget peoples names. In fact, I have forgotten someones name. Though I attribute it to not hearing him correctly after we were introduced, I did forget it when I saw him again. I did learn his name properly that time, and I haven’t forgotten it since. I’m sure people also completely forget other people, whether from not seeing them for a long time, or because they just put that memory out of mind and can’t get it back, or for some other reason.Those who are or who have been close to me though; my friends, my family, the experiences I’ve had with them, and all the memories. Those I honestly could never forget, and I’d never want to. I of course will never forget kissing my first love in the airport, or any of the feelings or emotions I experienced in that relationship that I can still recall. Or the wonderful European accents of another who whispered to me deep into the night. Or my dear friend beyond the midnight window, I could never forget you and all of your kindness and love. Or the lover who I had many firsts with, including learning to ride a horse, I could never forget you or how much you loved me. Everyone who’s ever left their mark on me, who has changed my life, they’re all very important to me, and I will never forget them. I wonder though… will someone will forget me?
I’ve thought rather extensively on the possibility of being completely and utterly forgotten. Dust blown away in the wind. Sometimes though I think how nice it would be to just stop existing, to have my presence effectively erased from reality as though I were never here to begin with. Of course this is a dangerous course to wander down, but its purely in a hypothetical sense. I much more frequently am worried about being forgotten. I want those people I know, those people I love, and those I’ve encountered and shared experiences with…I want them to remember me. Some part of me at least. No one can fully remember me as I am completely, because no one person has ever seen all of me. But as long as some small element of my being is remembered… any part of me; my body, my smile, my voice, my kisses, my taste, my smell, my thoughts, my dreams…then it gives me a greater hope for my existence. I’ll no longer purely exist as this singular being I am, I’ll exist within them as well, in some abstract fragment of the whole. You might gather that I might even want you, the one who’s eyes are reading this on a computer screen, to somehow remember me.
Perhaps you will?
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Posted in Whispers
Tags: love, memory, observations, real, silence, thoughts, you