memory

How much memory is too much memory?

People tell me I remember too much, for too long. Some tell me I am a keeper of things past and precious. What I don’t tell them is that my blue whale of a heart knows no mediocrity. It’s an ancient machine that notices everything, every necessary and mundane detail, and bottles them up somewhere deep inside. The sooty, graffiti-stained walls of an old city; the mild, nervous tremble in the voice of a long-lost friend; mother’s palms smelling of ginger and garlic on Sunday afternoons — they’re all in there. It is a continuous work in progress, this filing of memory. When times change and along its flimsy tides so must the people, I like to pick morsels of memory from these archives and retrace them as they once were. Before life happened to them, much before the world had broken them at places they could not speak about, and way before remembering too much was considered outdated.

Picture is taken from here