I collect things. Or perhaps ‘collect’ isn’t the right word. I keep things. You see, I’ve got a terrible memory. Sometimes I feel like the guy from the movie Memento who has lost his capacity for short term memory and so has to constantly write notes to himself so that when he reboots he’ll know what the hell he was doing and can continue to live a life of some meaning. Only I don’t write anything down. And so what I retain in my mind about my past are simply impressions of things. Feelings without meaning. Snapshots of an event whose context is lost. More than once I’ve had a conversation with an old friend and couldn’t recall most of the events they were trying to reminisce with me about. I kept having to say “Are you sure it was me you were with?”
It’s a little frustrating and sometimes depressing when I realize that I don’t remember that much about my own life. Maybe that’s why I’m such a packrat and why I’m such a lover of nostalgia. The stupid little things that I keep with me when I move from house to house, the things that I never look at and never use are the keys that unlock my memories. I cherish them and it pains me to part with them, because I know that when I throw out those stupid trivial physical things, that baggage, I give up the memories that they unlocked, too.