the sense of an ending

1) Sunlight through the window as I awake in a strange room with unfamiliar wallpaper.

2) A blue couch that acts as a vantage point as different people walk by with bemused stares plastered on their faces.

3) Leaning in for a kiss in the front seat of a car.

4) A boy sitting on a bench in the middle of a park, sobbing uncontrollably as taillights pass him by.

5) The same boy but much younger, staring at his father who is embarrassed of him because he cries too much.

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As the memories sluice down my brain, I am overcome with a sense of emptiness. Memory acts like a drug, and like all drugs the indulging of memory eventually leads to addiction. This dependency on memory swells till the point that existence is created within memory, and the life lived in the present comes secondary to the one lived in the head.

Memory is history. But more than that it is a guide. Decisions are informed by experience, and experience is hinged on memory. What shaky foundations are laid here, when all our conditions of autonomy are influenced by a series of flashes that may or may not be true.

a + b = x 

To make sense of memory through mathematics would seem logical if not for the fact that memory does not operate based on logic. If the signifier, (a), represents memory, and the signifier, (b), represents experience, the addition of a + b would hypothetically lead to a logical answer. The person existing both here and now, the product of memory and experience, (x). This sense of an ending could seem satisfactory, but the problem lies in the value of memory (a). The slightest of deviations in memory would lead to the outcome of the equation being radically different each time.

This is in essence, the very dilemma that presents itself. Each time I attempt to solve the equation, the value of memory changes and with it the legitimacy of any profound realization I was hoping to extract from all this. The value of memory is a fluctuating one. How can we rely on something that constantly changes with time, that jumps back and forth from one apparent certainty to another? If all our memories are so wildly unstable, so prone to dilution and saturation, what hope is there of an answer? Is there really such a thing as an actual account of what happened? The moment something is experienced, the chemicals in our brains work instantaneously to add impurities to this experience. The truth, if there is any of it, is filtered out semblance by semblance until all that remains is a memory.

All our memories work like circumstantial evidence and we use this information to make conclusions that we are quick to affirm. Categorically, our memories always fall into what is good and what is bad. One, two and three are good ones, four and five less so. But this is only how I remember them. The truth is that we are on shaky ground, the truth is that we are unable to collaborate the event with the memory, the truth is that there is great strife which simmers underneath. The greatest truth perhaps, is that we are all guilty of forgetting.