My Name is Memory

by Ann Brashares

But certain souls cohere. It’s rare but possible. Certain souls pair up eternally, not unlike geese or lobsters.

You wanted to think that history was a story of progress, but seeing what remained of Pergamum and the direction we were going, you just knew it wasn’t so.

She once asked her father why they always talked about the Civil War, whereas it seemed like Yankees never did. “Because we lost,” he said. “You forget your victories, but you remember the losses.”

There are short periods of joy you have to stretch through a lot of empty years, me more than most. You have to make them last as well as you can.

If there’s one sad thing I know, it’s that nobody’s experience is ever the same as mine.

It was the rhythm of human enterprise to invent and worship some new approach, to fully reject it a generation later, to realize the need for it again a generation or two after that and then hastily reinvent it as new, usually without its original elegance. Scientists hated to look backward for anything.

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.

Fairness turned out to be a human construct, and the universe had little use for it.

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.”

“Although most psychics, if they are any good, do have some memory of old lives. And so do most of the people we consider insane. An asylum is about the densest concentration of people with partial memory you will ever find. They get flashes and visions but usually not in the right order.”

“Yes. The regrets stay with you. They distort you over time. Even if you can’t remember them.”

Dana was familiar to me, probably from an old life but also because she had the ragged look of a deeply agitated soul. I recognized her as the kind that took her agitation from one life to the next, wreaking havoc as she went. I’m sure she tortured the people who loved her, made them worry about where they’d gone wrong, when probably they couldn’t have made any difference one way or the other.

Sometimes he felt sure that the key to happiness was a poor memory.

Geese paired up like humans, Joseph explained. Better than humans, because geese stayed true.

He and Joseph would look up at the racing V overhead, a single thumping bird soul, and watch them with the excitement of travel and the sadness of being left again.

In this present body he hadn’t been loved, and he found almost nothing to love about himself. He didn’t want to give a mother that kind of power, but Molly had it anyway.

It was amazing how he thought he could take his whole self with him to every new life, not remembering that when you left someone like Molly, you left a part of yourself behind forever. Sometimes he wondered if his memory for the important things was really very good at all.

He didn’t try to organize it or record it for the long future. This was what he had. It not only mattered, it mattered the most. He kissed her with everything, because loving a person was all you could do.

Thoughts were nothing. Memories were nothing. They were nothing you could touch. They took no time. You could fit them all on the point of a pin. You could bring your entire world into doubt in a span of a few seconds.

If you didn’t have a choice, you had to make a choice. If you didn’t have options, you made some. You couldn’t just let the world happen to you. He’d done that too long.

Love demands everything, they say, but my love demands only this: that no matter what happens or how long it takes, you’ll keep faith in me, you’ll remember who we are, and you’ll never feel despair.