Memory

Normally my memory is absolutely craptastic. I'm absent-minded, I forget things I've been told, names, faces, numbers. I forget important things, like years of my life. Most of the time, if you asked me to remember a specific event or period of time, I'm not actually calling up memories, I'm calling up a list entitled Good Memories To Recount which I can then list off without actually needing attachment.

Tonight I'm close to memory-sensory overload. I don't know if it's related to the melancholy or not, if one triggered the other.

The smell and sound of living overseas, laying on the damp grass at girl scout camp, my grandmother's attic, the woods by my parents' house, dozing while riding the bus home after work in a freezing February, watching the sun rise as I waited for the school bus back in high school, walking to the small library in my hometown, the bridge I used to stand on and watch the water go under, my treehouse, the sunlight in the woods behind my school, riding in the backseat of my parents' car, giggling nervously in a closed science building on someone else's campus.

People I gave parts of myself to, people that I'll probably never talk to again.

I save files obsessively because I'm scared I'll lose them.

I learned that lesson with my best friend from high school. I hosted her website and we talked all the time except when she went to college she was online less and less and her parents moved once her brother graduated high school and my webhost went down and I didn't have any backups of her writing. I have, in a journal she gave me for Christmas one year, a single one of her stories, handwritten by her.

God, I miss her. Every once in a while I'll google her name with various qualifiers, see if anything turns up. No luck yet, but it's a big internet.

… I should go to bed.