CarrollBlog 3.19

One Saturday while eating a tuna melt sandwich and staring out the kitchen window he realized memory is not a stable friend. Too often it lies, distorts, or frequently forgets many things both important and trivial. Memory steals parts of your life that should have belonged to you forever. It's like entrusting the only complete copy of your history to an erratic, frequently scatterbrained, sometimes irascible person who doesn't always do their job well and can't be bothered keeping the records straight. Unlike you, they don't care what the name of that wonderful French restaurant in Amsterdam was or the name of your high school enemy's sister.

In trying to remember the details of the time he'd shared with his lovely girlfriend, it was both disturbing and disheartening how much he couldn't recall beyond a certain point. What had they done on their first date? What was that great funny thing she'd said after they slept together the first time? What was the name of the childhood dog she loved so much and was always telling stories about?

One of his colleagues used the phrase "convenient history" to describe the way people remember their lives or specific events. Facts are superfluous; most people live in self-created convenient histories made up of unreliable memories-- some true, some distorted, some altogether false. They do this for peace of mind, to keep a kind of daily balance, and even sometimes to maintain sanity.

from a new short story