Those who forget

Memory is a funny thing.

Memories are even funnier things.

They seem so concrete and so incorporeal at the same time, two sides of the same coin. For me, memory is not just visual, seeing things in that weird, gray space behind my eyes. I can actually feel the memory. Smell the memory. Hear the memory. (Maybe you can, too, but I'm in the weird, gray space behind my eyes, not your eyes, so I wouldn't know, would I?)

Sometimes it's a dream that sets it off. Or maybe it's the dream that's being set off. A dream can affect the way I feel for the whole day if it stikes that nerve at the center of a memory, sending waves radiating through me. Like a song stuck in your head, repeating over and over, until it's almost unintelligible and retains so little connection to where it started that it almost seems like something new.

Or maybe it's the song itself. Random songs, like Possum Kingdom by The Toadies, or Headed for a Heartbreak by Winger. Songs that dredge up the feeling I was wrapped in when I first heard it or when it played at a time when my emotions were exposed and ripe for insinuation.

Sometimes memories are like having an ache in a tooth. Not a sharp pain, but a dull ache, the kind where I can't keep myself from pressing my tonuge against the tooth or clenching my teeth, just to remind myself what it feels like. The pain flares up and fades, rises and subsides like the shadows in the woods on a moonless night.

Happening on a forgotten scrap of writing. Catching just the edge of a perfume wake or a breeze that passed through pine trees. Some building or clearing, echoing images off the canyon wall in that weird, gray space behind my eyes.

There are those who forget, and for some, that may be best. Not every memory is something to keep in a drawer, where you can take it out every now and then and turn it over in your hands. But if you do have memories in your drawer, like I do, you are destined to repeat.