The Persistence of Memory
Eating an elephant's hippocampus one bite at a time
The other day I ran into a man who didn’t remember going on a date with me.
Recently, I saw someone on Twitter say that the most unrealistic thing about Sex and the City was that they’re always running into their exes on the street. But it happens to me more often than I’d like.
This occasion wasn’t on the street though, it was at a speakeasy above a restaurant where I’d just had dinner with friends, and where he was a waiter. I recognized the man across the dark bar immediately: he was someone I had spent the years between 2019-2021 matching with on different dating apps, only for neither of us to follow through on actually setting up a date. Finally, at the tail end of that back-and-forth, we matched one last time, and agreed to go out. It wasn’t a slam dunk nor was it particularly memorable. But I knew him when I saw him.
He, however, did not have the same immediate recall. When he came over to take our order, I smiled at him, and he tilted his head at me, finally saying, “Do I know you from somewhere?”
“We went out,” I said flatly. I hadn’t meant to say it outright, but I didn’t know how to couch it in an appropriately flirtatious or offhand way.
“Oh! Right,” he said. I could tell he was still trying to place me in his mind. I offered him my name, and the bar we had gone to, and tried very casually to say, “It was such a long time ago, ha ha.” Insert wacky self-deprecating eye-rolling emoji.
He finally did remember, we laughed about it, and he was perfectly friendly and attentive the rest of the night. But I was mortified.
Why had I even bothered to mention it at all? He clearly hadn’t remembered going out with me, why couldn’t I have just pretended the same?
Why could I still call back details of a boring night from years ago? We hadn’t slept together, or even kissed, and we had barely more than two drinks before deciding neither of us was really feeling it. But still—I remembered the shirt he had worn and the sinking approach of the ick when he said his band’s music was a blend of “indie dreampop shoegaze.” I remembered his first and last name, and the bars he had worked at. Was it possible that I was so unmemorable that he couldn’t recall the same?
And this wasn’t even someone I had a crush on. It’s terrifying to think of the fates of the men I actually have been obsessed with.
For most of my life, I have been complimented on having a good memory. I’m the record-keeper for happenings in college and grade school, the scribe of ancient blurry nights and referee of who said what. I’ve always felt proud of it. But I find myself more burdened with it the older I get.
You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?— Anne Carson, from “The Glass Essay”
In The Worst Person in the World (dir. Joachim Trier, 2021), there’s a dynamic [spoiler alert!] where the main character’s ex is dying of cancer. In their last conversation, he says to her that after he dies, a part of her is going to die too—all the memories he had of her, the moments of just the two of them, his version of their relationship—will be lost to time.
Of course it made me think of Danny. It’s what inspired me to write about feeling haunted by his absence, of all the times it was just the two of us that now only I have access to: “I think that whatever he experienced from the driver’s side went along with him, that all my recollections are incomplete without him behind the wheel.”
But part of me felt comforted by my superior memory then—not only that I could easily recall all the moments that felt special or mundane, or even the ones that sat like dead air between us in the car—but that I had control over the narrative in my own head now. Not that I wanted to erase his side of the story. I still gave credence to his unknowable thoughts and feelings, intimations of frustration and confusion, but I could think back on our time together and infuse them with all the love and nostalgia and warmth that I wanted, because now there was no one else there to say, “I don’t remember it happening like that.”
It’s different when the other person is still alive.
Being the only one who remembers things from a relationship is a humiliation ritual. I’m embarrassed by the bear trap of my mind, holding impossibly tightly to old scraps: green and silver text threads, an old sweater, conversations in dimly lit rooms, the weight of a hand on my leg, the silhouette of a man’s back in the dark. I feel like a serial killer who keeps souvenirs. And I worry that one day I’ll slip up and reveal my mental hoarding to one of my victims. I think the people I’ve loved—who I do not imagine to be burdened with any of these memories—would be as horrified as if they found out I had a lock of their hair or a collection of their teeth in a drawer.
I was recently obsessed with a screenshot of a TikTok that said “Amtrak northeast regional hates to see me coming because I’ve actually never gotten over anything in my life EVER” [cue every 4-hour trip between Boston and NYC spent ruminating intensely to a cinematic soundtrack] and it’s true that I’m a romantic and a nostalgic who likes to sit in the past. But it’s also hard to move on from things when the memory of them feels as fresh as if they happened yesterday.
In college I used to reblog screen grabs from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on my tumblr when I was trying to get over someone. Shots of Jim Carrey crying in the front seat of his car shouting, “I’m erasing you, and I’m happy! The perfect ending to this piece of shit story!” I thought if I cosplayed as Joel or Clementine I’d be able to shut the past out, that I could erase someone entirely—every time we had touched or kissed or spoken—by just willing myself to forget them. Not only did that not work, but it seemed to make the intensity of the memories come back tenfold. Don’t think of a pink elephant, etc. Too late.
Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.
— William S. Burroughs
Sometimes—and this is my mental illness—I worry that because I have such a good memory now, it means one day I’ll lose it. I’m terrified that I might get Alzheimer’s or dementia, or get into an accident that causes me to forget it all. All my little souvenirs being washed down the drain.
When I wrote about being haunted, I also mentioned the idea of grief as a form of dyschronia. And while I wouldn’t compare the fog of “grief brain” to the debilitating effects of a degenerative neurological disorder, there is something about the conflict of my sharp memory versus an impossible reality that make me feel completely disoriented, like someone who no longer recognizes their surroundings or the faces of the people around them. This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife.
The freshness of memory strikes again, harder, in the face of death. Most days, I can’t get my hands around the idea of a permanent loss. Someone was just in this room. Someone was just sitting in that chair. I can see the warm dent in a pillow. I know when my phone dings I’ll see their name on the screen, just like I have a thousand times before. If I close my eyes and recreate the exact likeness of the person I love, down to a single stray hair, then I should be able to conjure them. If I can still smell someone’s skin, shouldn’t they be walking through the door any minute now?
The older I get, the more I believe in the idea that time is a flat circle. As a child, I felt burdened by melancholy. I was sensitive, and often felt deeply sad for reasons I couldn’t articulate. I remember being 12 years old laying on the family room couch on a rainy Sunday afternoon listening to Death Cab for Cutie’s album Plans as it played on the stereo (thanks, Dad) and being immensely depressed, interpreting the lyrics from the viewpoint of someone much older who had the lived experiences of the songs: the stagnant disappointment of fading relationships and the terror of a hospital room.
The other day, I took a walk down to the water in the rain and listened to Plans for the first time in a long while and thought back to being a kid and the fear and mourning I held in my small body, feelings that largely disappeared as I got older. But I now knew the adult stagnancy and the terror. I could still feel the rough fabric of the couch on my cheek, and for a moment had a visceral imagining of being there. The past and present fusing again. Like James Joyce asked: Or was that I? Or am I now I? Can’t bring back time. Can’t you?
Sometimes I wonder if I’ve felt my life in reverse, like an emotional Benjamin Button. That maybe I was born grieving for something I didn’t know yet, and now that it’s happened, I can finally let it go.
Of course, you never really forget anyone, but you certainly release them. You stop allowing their history to have any meaning for you today. You let them change their haircut, let them move, let them fall in love again. And when you see this person you have let go, you realize that there is no reason to be sad. The person you knew exists somewhere, but you are separated by too much time to reach them again.
— Chelsea Fagan, How We Let People Go
Having a good memory is, unfortunately, a huge feeder for one of my worst qualities: being a know-it-all. It’s great for trivia but horrible for just about everything else; it should be a sin to always want to be the smartest person in the room. I will probably be atoning for it the rest of my life.
But I am trying to soften my hold on memory as a weapon. I think often of the Amy Tan quote, “You have an indelible memory! You can never forget a thing! Well, let me tell you, your recollection of every last detail has nothing to do with memory. It’s called holding a goddamn grudge.” Guilty as charged!
When I was younger, it was satisfying to keep tally of things, to forgive but not forget. I don’t care for it anymore. It’s unfair to expect other people to live in the past, even if I keep a temporary residence there. But I’d like to end my lease. Have my mail forwarded to where and when I actually exist.
And even now when I fantasize about people I’ve had connections with over the years—one, five, ten years ago—I find myself grounding them in reality. I remind myself: This is a fun story. But that person is a stranger to me now. And that’s a good thing. If the roles were reversed (first of all, I’d be flattered to be fantasized about so jot that down!) I’d want a clean slate. I don’t want to be beholden to the version of me that existed at 18 or 25.
Truthfully, I think most of my attachment to my memories is rooted in pattern recognition. I feel safe when something reminds me of another thing I’ve experienced or read or seen before. I like to be able to point at a moment or person and find a familiar shape in them, and say that this new thing isn’t so scary because it’s just like something else. I’ve already been here before. Constantly weaving a web of context and precedent so I can find my way out of the great wide unknown.
But I’m tired of the circles. I’m bored of shuffling the same deck of cards. Years ago, I had a two-night stand with a man who simultaneously reminded me of everyone I had ever dated and no one all at once. I wrote about our encounter, likening it to a palate cleanser. He was familiar enough that I felt comfortable with him, but at the same time I couldn’t quite get a read on his personality or feelings. There was a blank, almost muted distance between us that I couldn’t cross. I wrote about laying in his bed, re-reading confusing texts from another man who I actually did have intense feelings for, and feeling relieved to be next to a stranger instead: “He turned away from me in his sleep. He didn’t have the smell of a man in bed—musky, like sweat or cologne. He smelled like nothing. He could have been anyone.”
I’ve been trying to palate-cleanse my life lately. Embrace innocuous unfamiliarity to try and gently erase some of my old patterns. New gym, new therapy, new writing schedule, new sheets on a new mattress. My phone’s lock screen is a photo of an art installation that reads: If there is a past I have forgotten it.
But I haven’t, of course. I won’t. I keep my little box of souvenirs tucked away for another rainy day. Not to keep score, and not to torture myself. Just in case of emergency, like a string in a labyrinth, so I can say that I’ve been somewhere before, or at the very least: I was here.