Amnesia—my vice, my drink, my drug. Being an addict of memory loss means I’ve got a sickness for which there is no cure. Circumstances and situations, events and experiences, people and places: all are lost to me because my eyes forget, my body forgets, my fingers and mouth and nose all forget; yet my bitter foolish heart keeps beating and my legs keep walking, carrying me towards some future that I will never remember because I’ve found my way into another dimension, a dimension of calamity and sinking ships, but I am still here because my brain my stubborn brain sits idly on a shelf in my room, following all the rules of a regular 3-D world, defiant and unforgiving to my blight.

Do you know what that feels like, to be completely disconnected from your entire world, floating, trying to find a resting place somewhere, anywhere, floating at a million miles an hour towards the earth, only to crash because heavy things can’t fly? Enveloped in a cocoon of detachment and dismay, I seek relief, release, redemption, retribution.

Forgetting is my curse, because the one thing I can never forget is that I can’t remember. Gossamer walls protect my cache of memories, so everyday something new is lost to the winds scorching through my halls. Hollow echoes greet my cries.

It’s the strangest thing, you know, thinking about my past, and it doesn’t feel like any of it ever really happened, even though I know of course that it did, because there are pictures and witnesses and people saying, “Remember that time…?” so I know it happened, but it seems like maybe it was in a short story that I read or a movie I saw, not a real event that I was actually involved in.

Just tell me what I’m supposed to do, when all your memories feel as though they belong to someone else.

Knowing they’re yours.

Languishing, because you know they’re yours but you can’t remember them, so they feel like memories belonging to someone else.

Maybe I went to Memories ’R’ Us and bought them. Now I own them, they’re mine, and I have to take these pieces and make a whole. Only…I seem to be missing the most important ones, because I have all right angles and pointy corners and what I need are round smooth connections.

Pleading to my memory keeper, I beg him for help, for guidance, for anything. Quotidian affairs of my life I can recall without the least hesitations, but the big things are lost, first kisses and lost virginities and true loves, tragedies and triumphs.

Razing the walls I’ve constructed is my only hope but what if I tear down the wrong wall and some of those memories, the horrible ones convicted of horrible crimes, are suddenly freed, let about to roam wild and invade every corner of my being?

Sometimes, sometimes, I like to imagine that when I die what happens is that I get to curl up in a big comfy chair, wrapped under a velvety blanket, and on one of those enormous movie screens I get to watch my entire life play out, relive all the moments, good and bad, and make those memories mine again.

Tell me that will come to pass, because it doesn’t seem fair that all these things can happen to me and all I’m left with is the suffering and the grief, but without any sense of reason, ownership or control. Understand too: my sorrow comes not from what I’ve been through only that I can’t forgive myself enough to remember.

Verisimilitude is all I have, and what is real anyway, because appearances are deceiving, and memory…well, he’s is a slippery little devil, isn’t he?

What has happened, who is that in the mirror? Xeroxed copies have overtaken my original self and what I see is grainy and washed out.

You know, if I still had my receipt, I’d return these memories back to the place I got them from; figures I’d throw away the one stupid thing I need. Zillions of memories to choose from and I am stuck with mine.