Fiction: All The Things You Don't Remember Doing

All The Things You Don't Remember Doing

Words by Perry L. Powell 
​Image by Alexander Clark 
QuailBellMagazine.com

Well, the days come and go, the years pass, and then you're old and you sit around asking yourself: "What did I do in my life? What did I do?" and oddly enough you find that you don't know, you don't remember, that most of your life is simply missing, though you know that there are things you must have done: you must have been a child, you must have played with toys, you must have gone to school, there must have been punishments, there must have been birthday cakes, but you have no sense, no inner conviction, that any of these things ever actually happened; your life seems like a movie that you may or may not have seen years and years ago―you know the title, there may even be some fragmentary scenes in your memory that you believe are from that particular movie, but, no you really can't be sure if you saw it or if you are merely going by what others have told you, by a critic on the television, perhaps by a trailer presented before some main feature you went to the cinema to watch. Your entire life has vanished, has fallen away, like your hair, like so many of your friends, and you sit staring at a blank wall on a wintery afternoon huddled under a blanket wondering.

 
Oh, there are some things, a bit here, a bit there. You remember the first time you danced with your wife, alone in an apartment, soft music playing, the feel of her body, the short skirted dress she wore. Yes, that is something you remember. You remember your kids. When they first smiled at you, holding your finger. Then, when they first said “No.” Or when they asked questions you couldn’t answer. Like “Why?” And there are other things, no particular order, no obvious reason for them, not all so good, not all bad, many simply irrelevant it seems. Strangely, you remember the photographs―there were a lot of photographs during the early days of your marriage and as the children arrived. Odd to remember the photographs, but not the events themselves. As though the image were more real than the reality. But when you think about it, photography is all about chemicals and science. Who knows what memory is about? I can reprint a photograph. What can I do with a memory?

#Unreal #Fiction #Memory #Photographs

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