Elephants

"Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summon them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!" -John Irving

It's always been well-known, among anyone that knows me well, that I have a very selective sort of memory. There are things I do not forget - largely useless little tidbits that someone mentions casually - and things I simply cannot hang on to.

Usually, the things that are lost to time for me are much larger, much more significant than the pieces that never leave. There are people - in fact, entire groups of people that were a part of my life for a part of time that I simply cannot recall.

Suddenly, I find myself confronted by thousands and thousands of memories. They are flooding back to me at an incredible rate and it's all sorts of things - books from my childhood, scents, words spoken, emotions, situations and even some of those forgotten people.

It's as if a kindly librarian is opening the filing cabinets that lie in the dark room way in the back of the musty old building. She's tossing manuscripts at me at a breakneck speed saying, "Dear, try this one." and then a moment later, "Oh no, you'll LOVE this one."

I'm trying desperately to read them all, but it's hard at the pace with which files are being given to me. I wan to assimilate them into my consciousness of present and then to organize them neatly before I hand them back to her. I can't keep them all nor do I wish to. But I am interested in reviewing them briefly before filing them back where they belong.

I even have some more recent documents that I'm going to hand off to her, just for safekeeping.