The Persistence of Memory

“She wakes early on a Saturday with the warm morning sun on her face, and finds the other side of the bed empty. If she turned over, she would see him pulling a white t-shirt (that isn’t his) over his dark curly hair and quietly slipping out the door. But she doesn’t turn over. She doesn’t think about the (in)significance of this moment. She doesn’t analyze the social circumstances and historical narrative that conceived moments like this. She doesn’t feel guilty, or ashamed, or really anything. She picks up a small notebook and pen from under the night-stand. She flips through the first few pages, finally stopping on a half-filled page. It’s a numbered list, and she adds his number and the date to it. His image has already begun to decay in her mind. Was his shirt blue? Were his eyes green? At this point, it doesn’t matter. He is reduced to a number. She writes “Chris?” and closes the book before falling back to sleep without considering that he won’t even remember her as a number, let alone a name.”

We let total strangers into the most intimate parts of our body. We expose ourselves completely to people we don’t even know. And at least part of us knows that if we bothered to get to know them, we wouldn’t want to sleep with them anymore. We don’t attach meaning to sex because we don’t see people; we see an act. We fuck, we orgasm, and then we realize that’s a person between our thighs. Our memory knows a thing or two about repression though, and allows us to move on. Images of someone melt, mesh, merge, and mold around thoughts in our minds. A memory boils down into a number. Then we wear our numbers like badges of simultaneous honor and disgrace, but often forgetting the people themselves entirely. I keep a list. I’ve become obsessed with remembering. I remember because I know how terrible it is to know you’ve been forgotten. I force myself to remember because I know it’s so much worse when you forget.