memory
Lately I feel like my memory isn’t what it used to be. I used to know at least six phone numbers (home, grandparents, mom/dad’s cell, mom/dad’s work) and now I can hardly remember two (my own cell and work). Being asked for a phone number at the hostess stand feels like playing around the world with exponents when I’ve only prepared times tables. (I wonder if kids nowadays still do that in math class or if it’s now in the same trash can as cursive.)
I often tell people I can’t lie because I wouldn’t remember the lie, which is mostly true. The only problem is that as I age, my brain has become a fan of revisionist history. It likes to rearrange past events in a way that magnifies my emotional response and betrays the objective truth, and then I start to “remember” things in a way that probably didn’t happen. To counteract this, I try to journal when significant events of big feelings come my way. But I basically never read old entries, which renders the journaling pointless. Do I think this is a problem? Maybe…but I doubt this is too different from how most people are living, by which I mean predominantly in their heads, replaying distorted memories that become their truth. So I guess more accurately put, I usually don’t intentionally lie. But if I recount a twisted version of something that happened three years ago, just know that it’s what I believe to be true. And that I want to hear your version of things too. Just two unreliable narrators, sitting in a tree ~