A thing about memory is that once you have lost it, it can take days, weeks, months, even years to remember. There are even times where you can never remember it again. To have a poor memory is to be out of a joke that everyone else seems to get, but you laugh anyway because you don’t want to seem so out of their level. I don’t suffer from amnesia or short/long term memory loss, yet I have never really remembered an important event as everyone would, talking about it like it so clearly happened yesterday.

“Remember that time when …?”

  When they ask me if I share the same reoccurring thought that seems to stay trapped in their minds, I awkwardly smile and give a short nod, pretending like I know exactly what happened to who during what in where. I was there, I should know, right? Unfortunately, I can’t even remember what I did that morning, or three minutes ago to be honest. It appears as though the things that I do remember are the things that I wish to forget. An embarrassing moment with someone I think so fondly of, or a threatening experience that continues to haunt me until life becomes death. It gives me the upmost worry, of being able to remember an incident in which people would stare; probably thinking ‘well that was just strange’, and I would pretend that nothing had happened, or try to escape my own body and live in my thoughts for the time-being. It’s an even bigger worry when someone asks for the thing or favor that I had agreed with before, but now don’t even remember speaking with them prior to the conversation I have now with them. And with a fear in my heart that there would be a chance that they knew that I didn’t, and the ever growing heartache I would feel when I do know that they know that I didn’t, kills me inside and out. I want to be able to remember, to be able to laugh at an inside joke without it having to be explained so that I would remember and then never to be spoken of again. Memory is so precious to me, and yet so lost in my hands. I am not in the right mind to be carefree; frolicking through memories as though in some sort of spirited dance of flashback after flashback. Instead I stand in the middle of a million signs, telling me to go where the unfamiliar path of familiarities takes me. I end up losing my sense of direction, trapped in the place that seems to taunt me so. And it hurts, it hurts to know that even after so much time I’ve spent trying to understand what it was that was said, I can’t do it. I know nothing of the past whatsoever.

“I’m sorry, I really can’t remember.”