I’m notorious for remembering phone numbers, like the one to our credit card company. My husband had to make the call to the company two days ago and proceeded to look up the number. I said in my loudest voice, “Here’s the number. You don’t need to look it up.” Even if I haven’t dialed a particular person’s phone number for years I can recall it if the circumstance requires it. I can’t explain my ability to do this. I’ve always carried it as a part of my personality.
But it startles me when I try to access a memory, an important one and my mind fails me. There is some sadness when these failures happen.
I’ve forgotten the sound of my father’s voice. He spoke loud, with clarity, but the general sense of his voice I struggle to remember. I can recall his tone, the cadence of his speech, but I can’t hear it. I’ve forgotten. A voice I heard for 35 years becomes part of the past and I need to watch a video clip to remember that megaphone sound.
I’ve forgotten parts of my childhood. I’ve forgotten the days of no responsibilities, the days full of play and new beginnings. I’ve forgotten monkey bars and popsicle sticks. The fearless life is something of another lifetime.
I’ve forgotten what it feels like to have ambition. The late nights, the days of reading, studying, and writing all day and night are muted. Working toward a goal seems so impossible these days.
I’ve forgotten what it feels like to be the pretty girl.The one who walked the college halls and got noticed. I’ve forgotten how I never had to try a dress on when I shopped. The size always fit when I tried it on at home.
I’ve forgotten about days without interruption. The days of late night movies, sleeping in, and reading the newspaper on Sunday morning.
It’s the part of life I don’t understand. The way we forget the things that kept us moving along. You are arriving every day of your life, trying to be present, and suddenly you forget how you even made it to the destination. I’m sad about it, but I also realize it is the normal cycle of life.
You love, you grow, you live and you lose. And eventually you forget.
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What have you forgotten?
Welcome! I am a lawyer turned freelance writer, essayist, and editor. On staff at Literary Mama and the co-founder and co-editor of the literary journal, The Sunlight Press, my essays and reported work have appeared in The Washington Post, The Lily, Saveur, Civil Eats, Brain, Child, ESPN and elsewhere. I am currently at work on a memoir on grief and culture and how it provides perspective on life’s ordinary graces. I invite you to appreciate the ordinary with me. I hope my daily practice of seeing the magic in the mundane helps you celebrate and find more of these moments in your life too.
I’ve forgotten what it feels like to be the pretty girl
I feel completely invisible, a middle-aged mother with three little kids.
You always say it so perfectly, Rudri. And you always make me think.
Wow. Your words have caused me to forget my own… powerful. I must begin with yours:
“You are arriving every day of your life, trying to be present, and suddenly you forget how you even made it to the destination.” This line – is so powerful… but it’s true – if you focus on showing up – you forget how it is you even show up. Is the magic in being present or working toward it? These questions hold volumes.
Thank you,
R
Oh, Rudri. Reading this made me think about my Papa. About how I never knew how important it was to listen and catalog and remember, and now he’s gone. There are no videos and I don’t know if I really remember his face or only the face I see in photos. Every once in a while I catch a glimmer of the way he hitched his pants or adjusted his cap. But it’s only a glimmer.
I don’t know what I’ve forgotten. I know what I miss, and what lies in the past like an old friend. But I don’t know what crucial and life-altering moment is forever gone that I never thought to notice.
Hi Rudri,
Provacative thoughts…. I wonder if we really don’t forget, but that it all becomes part of the evolution of our being in the present point in time, helping us to appreciate the present with greater clarity of vision?
Trish
“I’ve forgotten the days of no responsibilities, the days full of play and new beginnings.” “I’ve forgotten what it feels like to be the pretty girl”. So poignant and so melancholic. I’m not sure you anticipated this response but I just want to hug you now.
I have old photos safely scanned into my computer, some of which are screensavers. I have a bad memory for so many things too but seeing them evokes both memories and emotions. It’s lovely having them around. Be sure to take lots of photos of the here and now and that, combined with your blog, will ensure that you’ll carry far more with you into the future.
I just have to say this too: You do know that you’re still that pretty girl – just older, wiser and therefore more interesting to talk to? And I’ll *bet* you are still noticed – you’re just not seeing it. x
Oh, this post tugged at my heart. There’s so much I’ve forgotten, too, and then some of the stuff I do remember with clarity seems silly. Why is memory so strange like that?
-Ditto the ambition and the pretty girl…oh, I yearn for just a flash or two of ambition.
I am continually baffled by memory. Why is it that we retain bits of memory that seem so insignificant and yet lose memories that are part of who we are? I don’t know. I don’t pretend to know. I imagine there is something to this though, some kind of inscrutable and protective logic. Maybe some things are just to tough for us to remember vividly?
I read this on my phone yesterday. Gorgeous post. I have forgotten huge sections of my childhood, and even the childhood of my kids – lack of sleep has much to do with it, I think.
But memories sometimes visit us in dreams. They are there, in the film of experiences we’ve lived. We simply may not access them at the times we wish. But they are there.
Hi Rudri, I hear your sadness and your melancholy and so I wish you new moments to rival the forgotten ones in vivid love and luminescent presence. When it comes to memory, it sounds as if the non-emotional and logical sequential facts, ones that can be stored digitally so-to-speak, are easily accessible; however, the emotional memories, those that are episodic, washed with feeling tones, smells, sensations and the music of lived experience… those are more holographic, and a little harder for you to catch hold of right now.
Memory is about accessing the information, it’s not that the little post-it with the key info is gone, it’s more like we just don’t know where it is. Your dad is certainly still in there, in your heart-mind, but the melancholy becomes a gate-keeper meant to protect you from too much feeling that might impede you from being there for those who need you today.
If you want to recover some of the memories, here is something to consider: first, you must get to a safe place (emotional and physical) , a place where you have time and willingness to cry if need be. Then you can look at your own post and see that you do have a template for your lost memories (your treasures that fell to the bottom of a sea of non-consciousness), you have even evoked a bit of that hologram of sensing and feeling in us, your readers. It’s like I can sense the edges of the eternal you with your dad, even though I have never directly met either of you—we all know what love and attachment followed by loss feels like (at least somewhere in our collective soul), and so we can relate, and thus connect, and thus invite connection between what has been and what you can vividly regain contact with in the here of the eternal now.
Think about smell, the smells you associate with dad, with college, with dresses in stores that need not be tried on. Let your mind float, love the baby, and college kid, and every “you” you wish to get back in touch with. Maybe you will not get the memory you were looking for, but maybe something you need to know, need to feel, will come to you—and if you trust that you are loved, that your dad’s spirit would certainly want you to feel safe and happy, perhaps you will make new discoveries (and then the frustration of the blockage will have proven its guiding value).
As for credit card phone numbers, I’ve sadly memorized mine too—as we seem to speak on a weekly basis because their computer simply can’t believe that all the necessary yet stupid things I must buy at Target and Trader Joe’s is not fraudulent activity, but rather life as I live it. They keep calling to protect me, but if they really cared maybe they would buy it for me instead.
All Good Wishes & Namaste
I think “forgetting” has its place. Along with the good moments I can’t recall (and lots of the boring ones), I’m assuming I’ve forgotten some bad ones too.
This line rings so true for me: “The fearless life is something of another lifetime.” Oh, how I wish it weren’t so, for me and for you.
And I used to remember phone numbers. And credit card numbers. And birthdays. Now, I’m lucky if I remember my own kids’ birthdays when I talk to the pediatric nurse on the phone! I’m hoping once these exhausting, sleep-deprived baby-and-toddler-filled days are behind me, some of that will come back. It will come back. Right??
Maybe forgetting is a way to be reminded, in a paradoxical way, that most things are impermanent.