“And I remember thinking, ‘I’m going to remember this for the rest of my life.'”
So I have in abysmal memory. It’s not something so terrible to where it has to be diagnosed as a standalone condition. It doesn’t make my life unlivable, but it does make it sometimes quite frustrating. It mostly makes it frustrating for the people that I’m having conversations with because I will be quite comfortable, actually, I’ll forget a lot of things alone in my own little ignorant bubble, but then my friends — I can’t answer simple questions, like, “What did you have to eat today?” or “Yo, you remember what XYZ said last week?” or “during yesterday’s lecture?” And it’s especially bad when a friend is recounting something that they told me during like, really deep personal conversation, or anything that they deemed important about themselves enough to tell me at some point and they’ll be like, “Don’t you remember? I told you when my birthday was,” or “this dramatic thing that happened when I was a child.” And I will have to kind of bite my nails and be like, “I’m so sorry. I don’t remember.” Because how long can I keep up with this when I don’t actually remember, any of the details? It makes me look like a terrible friend, but it’s really just my brain arbitrarily sorting all of these memories into important and worth keeping around and unimportant or distressing for some reason, which is why I think I’ve had trouble studying over the years because memorization is just not my strong suit.
But of all the memories that my brain decided to arbitrarily keep around, one of my most vivid memories — vivid and earliest, aside from really, really, really, really young. I was in fourth grade, and I was sitting during story time — it was story time or some classroom announcement, but it was at the teacher’s big rocking chair that was at the very back of the classroom, there was a big blue, yellow, red carpet which I think is just a general color combination that’s pretty ubiquitous in elementary schools. But I remember sitting on the edge of that carpet, not at all listening to what the teacher was saying, looking up at the tall blue store closet that was positioned at the edge of the carpet to kind of wall off the area from the rest of the classroom. And I remember looking up at the poster that was stuck to the side of it. It was an owl. It was a purple owl with a yellow beak. I think it had orange on it somewhere and had a clock on it. I don’t remember the contents of the poster, but I just remember, I can put myself in that moment and envision it very clearly. And I can also kind of remember, looking up my classmates sitting around me. I remember the color of their hair, and I remember looking down at that stupid carpet, and I remember thinking, “I’m going to remember this for the rest of my life.” And I did, somehow. My brain thought that that was important enough to keep around for some reason.
And I’ve tried for over a decade to recreate that exact moment by being on vacation somewhere and looking at a very beautiful landmark or something and thinking, “I’m going to remember this moment the rest of my life” or just being with friends or experiencing a joyful moment, or really anything — I’ve tried anything and everything to be in a moment and think to myself, “I am going to remember this moment for the rest of my life.” And I have just failed because my brain has for some reason decided that those memories were not nearly as important as this one core memory that I have as a fourth grader, which I think is pretty funny. But it’d be nice to be able to have one of those moments again because I — I just like going back into that moment and living what it was like to be a fourth grader, not sitting as a college student in the back of a lecture hall or anything. Just like sitting listening to my teacher talk but not really listening. I just wish I could go back to that moment.