Remember That?

What can you say about memory?

Nobody knows the future but everybody, everybody knows their past. I don’t know how it is for other people, but I remember it all. The worst part of total recall though, is standing in front of it, arms open wide. Hit me.

You take that girl there, standing with a far away look in her eyes. She isn’t wild now, she isn’t mad. She knows she has nothing besides the thoughts in her head. What then?

He was her first love, and who’s likely to forget that? He was flawless, as first loves usually are. Everything he said, his tiniest gestures, the way he just looked at her – heaven on earth. There could be a justification for every time he seemed distracted; she knew better than to inquire. She knew the colour of his eyes and the shade of his hair. Brown, it was just brown all along. There was the big beginning – fireworks, violins, and nothing was spared. Not even she. There were the talks: conversations about dreams, about trips to be taken, pets to be kept, the yin to the yang, soul-mates forever? So in the start there was everything. Fulfillment. 

Sigh.

Like a building with crumbling foundations, it toppled. Where she had it all, was rubble and dust. The future that had stood there out of reach, tantalizing her, vanished, smoky. Suddenly the things he said weren’t funny, they didn’t melt her heart. There grew a wall. It grew into a fence, and insults started hurling on both sides. After the hate came the indifference – a quoi bon dire? She didn’t know, he didn’t know, nobody knew. 

And she left.

She knows what she wants, and this isn’t it. But memory can be a shameless thing. Remember?