Recall

Recall

Memories are physical objects.

Val recounts this to me after another day lecturing undergrads while we
half-spoon on the couch. He tells me that every attempt to retrieve a
memory causes calcium proteins in your neurons to snap into a synaptic
rearrangement.

There are no true artifacts, only replicas.

Of course, the neurons fail. When you make a cast of a cast, errors
proliferate. Accuracy is impossible and unnatural. Decay is no different
from retrieval itself. A memory of a memory is both less precise and more
true— that is just the way molecules are. Nothing is like it used to be.

I’ll never look like I did in that one selfie.

To forget more efficiently, I start bringing certain memories to mind as
often as I can. Little rounded corners. Little details sloughing off, like skin,
or sand, or fat. Disgusting, to remember which store carries vegan stevia
chocolate. When I recognize a grocery aisle, it does feel like I am dying.

Residue, I need you.

There is no reason I should still know with utter clarity the particular angle
at which the two vestibule doors at Pepe’s Pizza clash. I do not need to
know when the Green Wharf adobo truck closes and I do not need to
know if the vendor ever received his sleeve gastrectomy.

So I think about it all the time.

I repeat the words until they stop being foods and then I repeat them until
they stop being words. Pizza becoming peace becoming unimaginable. Dinner
decaying into din into nothing more than noise. Meal reduced to me

and then I try to get rid of me.