Black socks and memory

I'm 32 and I'm astonished at how much I've already forgotten.

Dates past, dates future – lost without some electronic reminder. The rules of long division; gone. My university degree exists only as a certificate with my name on it. The names of B-list friends in high school. Addresses of my student houses. My grandfather's birthday. Entire cities I visited 15 years ago. The plots of so so many books - once I even read three chapters of a book and only as the plot grew turgid and the sense of de ja vu became impossible to dismiss, did it dawn on me that I had previously tried to read the damn thing and lost interest, around Chapter three. I had sold it to a second-hand bookshop. I had bought the next iteration at a second-hand bookshop. So, I had read three very ordinary chapters twice and was left with the disconcerting feeling I may have bought my own book back.

Even remembering last weekend takes prodding.

I have a theory though, that saves me from self-diagnosis of early Alzheimers and the race to write my salacious memoirs before the deterioration of my brain into soup. I've decided human memory, like digital memory, has technical obsolescence. Take your first computer, and think of all the old assignments and self-obsessed adolescent poetry you stored on floppies in Word 4, or Word 5.1 (teeheehee). At the time, those little pieces of you were saved because they were precious and needed to be kept, for posterity, for proof, for comfort. Then after the next upgrade they were stored safely on the shelf above your desk and you knew you'd get around, some day, to saving them on Word 6.0 (oh the nostalgia!). And then CD's evolved and could store even more and the disks were put in the box in the shed and occasionally you remember that once you'd had a go at writing a love sonnet and had written a particularly elegant essay on the Italian Renaissance, or had once studied French and it was around somewhere... on your old laptop maybe, or in the pile of CDs with the photos from two holidays ago that you haven't gone through yet...

We archive our memories and then we forget where we've stored them in our brain. By the time we think about what we've forgotten, things have changed and we're left with a brief wash of sorrow and the sense that we used to know, to be, more than this.

Or perhaps all our lost memories go to the same place those bravest of black socks head for when they strike out on their own. Maybe somewhere there is a land full of homeless memories with warm but mismatched little black feet.

I miss them.

I hope they're safe, because there's some shit out there I don't want to have to go through again.