I Forgot How to Remember

What was I saying, again?

If my memory serves me correctly, I came into being ‘round about a quarter of an hour ago. Anything back before records began is pretty hard to prove. One upside is I can’t really remember what it felt like to have a memory. But, I can only imagine some sort of access to the past was pretty handy.  

I don’t need much. It doesn’t bother me that I have little to say on the interior design of my mum’s womb. Reliving the injustice of that time my daddy gave my little brother the only chocolate muffin, the other week – it doesn’t interest me. Sometimes though, I could do with gleaning some information from all of those times before now – 20 to 2 and Tuesday, to name but a few.

Where is that fucking light switch? What was that thing I was supposed to do? What was I saying?

Sorry to disappoint. My memory loss wasn’t the result of a nasty bump on the bonce, while vanishing behind public transport. If that is what happened in that action film with the bloke from Good Will Hunting, I’m no doubt referencing at universal mum-standard. All of my scratchy flashbacks are: me, overly satisfied on sofas. Either, howling into my 5th bag of Quavers or gurning my face out of all proportion.

My brain doubled as a chemical processing plant for a number of years. And at some point, I clean forgot how to remember. Short-term, long-term and every term between – near-enough Kaput. 

Weirdly, all of those flashbacks are oblongish and feature me in the third-person. Then I realise that is a memory of a memory of a Facebook photo. A photo I should make a mental, and physical, note to untag.

Oopsy daisy, I’ve left myself with the memory of an elephant rampage insurance claimant. Every attempt at a stroll down memory lane, my thoughts run smack-bang into a big black screen. Some disgruntled cortex or another flicks off the switch on the simulator, and that pathway snaps to achromatic black. When I try another route, the same thing happens. For sure, I’ve definitely got the odd half-done doodle etched on my memory. Nothing worth stopping to admire, really.

The few memories I do have, I truly treasure. Those precious moments, like - “your keys are next to that Bueno wrapper under the futon, mate.” Even when I snap a mental reminder, the best my beatdown noggin can offer me is a hunch.

It’s a photographic memory, only with 19th-century equipment. A bulky and wooden contraption that needs the subject to pause for 12 seconds, and produces a faded, likeness hours later. Your wallet is on the shelf. Your wallet is on the shelf. Your wallet is on the shelf. The inkling my brain guffs just out of view 2 hours later is almost probably from this tenancy. 

When I’m trying to get the other figurative kind of my shit together, it’s no better. To say my brain is a sieve would imply it has some kind of practical use. I had to outsource my short-term memory to a string of physical reminders. 

Daily life is basically a really mundane version of that film with w’a’s-his-name/face from Home and Away - was it? You know, with the amnesia and the Post-it notes and those other distinguishing bits. 

Spare a thought for my unborn child, shaking at the school gates in the hammering rain. Cut to me: a nagging thought taking a slight edge off the enjoyment of my Panini.

There’s not a huge jump in picture quality from my dreams to my memories. My brain is rightly chuffed to have scrabbled together any kind of image: real or not. 

Sometimes, I feel a festering resentment towards someone, but can’t place exactly why. Then, it clicks - this fucker plotted with Andre the Giant to usurp me at the last battle of the Circe De Soleil. Leaving me with no choice, but to begrudgingly forgive them - in the waking realm, at least. Come nightfall, my vengeance will be swift and odd.

They say every time you access a memory you are remembering the last time you remembered that memory. I’m worried about smudging my recollections so young. If my grubby consciousness keeps pawing all over them, I’ll have nothing worth browsing in retirement. Probably, only the last, pitiful spirals of my mid-life crisis to flick through.

Groping hopelessly about in the dark for the light switch in my family home of 20 years, it hit me. It was an unremembered shelf, but one of those rare shelf impacts that give clarity. I realised I’ve got a real head start on senility, here. While you chumps are waiting passively around for life to gradually rob you of your faculties – I took the initiative.

It’s given me an insight into that papery ghost race that migrates to Wilkinson’s every Tuesday morning. Now I know why they tremble through the same old yarn, week after week. When I manage to fish a recollection out from my brain soup, it’s an occasion. I want to let the world know, starting with my captive audience, again. I couldn’t care less, if it’s the first time for you or not, because it feels like it for me.

There are worse places to be than the perpetual now. Dwelling never did anyone good. I’ve blitzed my brain into a compulsory state of Buddhism. Anyway, only having access to the future would be more annoying. All the lottery balls bouncing before your eyes, with no way to comprehend cashing them in.

Wait up, something is stirring in there. “Memento! I’m 70% sure it was, Memento.” Take that, brain. You dick.