mnemonic

I'm good at remembering most things. Really good. So good, that maybe I now consider it a curse. But this is after everyone thought I was some kind of prodigy. A prodigy, can you believe it? Although other people thought I might be a witch. Imagine the audacity it calls for to call a six-year-old child a witch. Maybe that's how things got so twisted. In any case, I'm not a witch, or a prodigy or a machine. I just have a good brain. Or had, rather.

I was very young when my Sunday School teachers discovered I could memorize Bible passages after they were read to me only once. I could already tie my shoes and braid my own hair just from watching my parents do it for me. I was good with numbers too, but especially obsessed with words and language, and on cue could easily recite lengthy lines of dialogue from any film or television show. My family used me for party tricks and liked to play a game where they'd turn on the radio and have me plunk out on a piano the melody to whatever pop song that had been playing.

I spent most of the earlier part of my life polishing and honing this ability to work to my advantage. When I learned how to read, I lived in the public library and made it my personal goal to read every encyclopedia and world atlas cover to cover. If it was printed on a page, I needed to know it. Facts, figures, dates, names, I thirsted for them, and they were acquired just as easy, crammed into my bank of knowledge. It wouldn't be long until this gift would only burn itself out, manifesting itself into a terminal case of apathy, laziness and eventually an attention span which now rivals that of a goldfish's. 

In college, what once I considered a key to absolute knowledge and power was now a crutch; no longer having to study or hardly apply myself, I had already grown distracted, lost interest in music lessons, misplaced my library card, and outgrew the spelling bees that had made me famous. I imagined my brain eventually shorting out from all the information I had forced to fill it with. The junk I had crammed into closets, stuffed into mail bags, stacks and rows of imaginary file cabinets whose drawers strained to contain all of the contents of the past twenty years before it spilled out into nothingness, the place where things go when you forget.

I started drinking. And like magic, the weight was lifted.  How thrilling to wake up any given morning and not remember anything from the night before. I was finally liberated. I took notes in class. I started tagging Post-it notes all over the place, stuck to the screen of my laptop reminding me to do this or that, I kept a planner! A planner, can you believe that? How normal. How beautiful. Lefty-loosey, righty-tighty, beer before liquor, never been sicker, and thirty days hath September... But I was not invincible, and that ugly curse would eventually creep to the surface, unlocking everything I had worked so hard to repress, finally hurling me towards my ultimate demise.

So what this comes down to is the last thing you said to me. I decided I would move to a new city, start over and work on forgetting the past nineteen months or so. I was doing alright when a few weeks later you emailed me out of the blue and told me to call you if I ever felt "up to it". I said something along the lines of Thank you but no, thank you. You said something like how you would never not be a part of my life and How could I forget who you were?

And just like that, I hated you. Almost as much as I hated the fact that I knew you deleted my phone number. So I deleted yours. But what I hated more than anything is that I know it, still. Not the same way I know my zip code, or The Pledge of Allegiance or the lyrics to "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", but the way I knew that if I opened my seventh grade math book, every single algebraic formula would come flooding back to me in variables and axes. The same way I know I can still tell you every American WWII aircraft's type, name and manufacturer.  Give me one line from "Romeo and Juliet" and I can recite the rest of it back to you, in its perfect iambic pentameter no less. The things I knew that could stay forgotten as long as they stayed out of touch.

I still could make a conscious effort to remember some things, but the morning I needed just one phone call (because that's all they give you) I had drawn a complete and hopeless blank. I was in a panic. I ran all possible combinations of numbers through my head, none of them familiar. I went through the drawers, ripped open forgotten files, frantically emptied out cabinets and desperately scrolled through the pages of my mental address book. Nothing. They had me in handcuffs stumbling down the stairwell when one came back to me, a man's familiar handwriting scrawled onto the back of a cocktail napkin sent fluttering under a table. Immediately I asked the detective to write it on my arm before I forgot it. And maybe I hate that I still carry them around, the numbers in ink on the inside of my arm weigh heavier than anything I ever remember remembering.

"How could I forget?" I'm still working on it.