the girl who remembers
Ironically, she doesn’t remember when it started, just that for as long as she could remember, she remembered everything. Every little detail of every little conversation, every little act of every single person she ever encountered. She remembered. To the untrained person, this could be seen as a blessing, but to her it was always a curse.
There is something beautiful about the way the brain protects it’s habitat by allowing people to forget the hurt and the pain, the arguments and the fights. It allows people to move on, forgive and forget, overcome obstacles and barriers that seem so distant and scary before they forgot what troubled them in the first place. She was not privy to this little life beauty.
When she was younger she would replay conversations over and over again in her head, trying to figure out the meaning behind that slight look to the left or hair tuck behind the ear. She tried not to remember the anger in the eyes or the slap across the face. Later, she tried to control the thoughts she remembered or tried to convince herself that the thoughts she thought were not the things she remembered. She would trick herself into pretending these were distorted memories like everybody else has, a figment of unsaid words and actions. But she knew this wasn’t the case. For someone who remembers everything, it’s hard to move on from anything. She was stuck in the cycle of her own memories and the memories of others that had been passed down to her.
Now, She sits in a near empty room. No television, no computer, no newspapers or magazines telling her of things she wouldn’t be able to forget. She spends her days writing in notebooks everything she remembers, trying to make sense of the purpose of this curse. She lingers over the happy memories, drawing them out over page after page. She tries to make the unhappy memories footnotes in her life history. At the end of each day she reads over what she has written, some of it making more sense than others. Some of it disturbs and frightens her. Some fills her with the greatest feelings of happiness. Each time she reads her words back to herself, she feels a piece of that memory crumble away from her thoughts. Pouring all her memories out on paper, without entertaining any new ones was the only way she could cope, resetting herself to zero, a blank page. Over time, all of these thoughts would become figments of a memory, closer to how other people thought. She had trained herself to compartmentalise so she wouldn’t have to think all these thoughts at once, something that had burdened her throughout her earlier years. This is how she lived now. And this is the only way she could live now for the girl who remembers.