My Name is Memory

by Ann Brashares

She is my doing and my undoing. She always had been.

The soul is a mysterious thing. It’s no less mysterious for me, though I’ve seen my own and others’ refracted through hundreds of bodies over time. One thing I can tell you from my unusual perspective is how powerfully our souls reveal themselves in our faces and bodies. Just sit on a train sometime and look at the people around you. Choose a person’s face and study it carefully. All the better if they are old and a stranger to you. Ask yourself what you know about that person, and if you open yourself to the information, you will find you know an overwhelming amount. We naturally guard ourselves from the obvious truths of strangers around us, so be warned. You can get overstimulated and uneasy if you really start to look. One of the skills of living is simplifying as you go, so when you let your guard down, the complexity is troubling. There are certain rare people you find—usually they are healers or poets or people who work with animals—who live their lives in this state, and I admire them and sympathize with them, but I am not like them anymore. I’ve done a lot of simplifying in my life.

As you look at this stranger’s face you will be able to guess pretty accurately at age, background, and social class. And as you look longer, if you let yourself see, the subtleties will clamor to show themselves. Doubts, compromises, and disappointments little and big—those usually reside around the eyes, but there are no rules. The hopes usually lurk around the mouth, but so do bitterness and tenacity. A sense of humor is easy to spot around the eyebrows, and so is self-deception. Add to your observation the set of the head on the neck, the carriage of the shoulders, the posture of the back, and you know a lot more. These are the accumulated qualities of the soul, and they are expressed in life after life. By the time a person gets really old, the soul has worn in its body so completely that she probably looks almost exactly as she would if she had reached that age in one of her other lives. She need barely have bothered with the new body at all. Which isn’t to say that souls don’t change and evolve over time, because they do. The first time you see a familiar person in a new body is a strange and even haunting sensation, but you get used to it. You start recognizing the telltale places where the soul asserts itself: the eyes, of course; the hands, the chin, the voice. The pathos is in how much of ourselves we hold out to any passing eye that takes an interest.

People sometimes talk about the power of first impressions, and believe me, there is truth to it. The path of your life can change in an instant. Not just the path of your life but the path of all your lives, the path of your soul. Whether you remember or not. It makes you want to think hard before you act.

His power over her was limited, because she didn’t love him.

Smell and taste, of course, were sister senses. More like Siamese twin sisters, with the first having most of the organs, including the brain. The second sister was built for pleasure and the occasional bitter warning. But it was smell that carried memory. He’d done enough work in neurology and even recent reading in neuroscience to know how simplistic his concept was, but that was still how he thought of it. Smell was like the wormhole connecting you to the other parts of your life. Memories of smell didn’t fade, and they short-circuited your entire psychology—they didn’t tunnel through endless experience or get loaded down by any part of your conscious mind. They stitched you instantly and fully to your other times, without regard to sequence. It was the closest thing to time travel on this earth. If he had to point to a place to explain his unusual abilities, it would probably be his nose. He’d had many of them over the centuries, and his gift of smell stayed with him through all.

She was as radiant as if she had been chosen by the sun.

You carry your past with you even if you don’t remember any of

“And why can’t I remember?” “You can, more than you think. Those memories are in there somewhere. You act on them in ways you don’t realize. They determine how you respond to people, the things you love and the things you fear. A lot of our irrational behavior would look more rational if you could see it in the context of your whole long life.”

All I could think to do was love her. That’s all a person can do.

I wished I could crawl into that moment and stay inside it without letting another one pass.

It’s amazing the things we take for granted.

when nature offers you one of her true gifts, there’s a special punishment for those who throw it away.

“You are a hoarder,” she said. It was something Ben had accused him of several times before. “Love who you love while you have them. That’s all you can do. Let them go when you must. If you know how to love, you’ll never run out.”

She seemed sad when she hugged him. “You love your memory, but you need to love your girl,” she said by way of parting. “You remember what is lost, and you forget what’s right in front of you.”

Fear almost always trumped joy, but not today.

He turned his head to look at her and shielded his eyes from the sun so he could see her well. “It’s funny, I look at you now, and you are all I can see.”

He was in a daze. He wanted to touch her and talk to her and smell her smell and watch her laugh. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want this to end. But he had to shake himself out of it. He didn’t care very much about what happened to him, but he cared about what happened to her.

More than anything she missed Daniel. The ache of missing him hung on her like a cloud and followed her everywhere she stepped. It got into her eyes and her nose and her mouth and her ears and changed the air around her.

It was a miracle, almost, how Marnie could love even when she didn’t understand. It was a miracle and a lesson.