Sympathy for the Strawberry
What will it be like when we can access our memories with perfect fidelity?
For some reason, the municipal building is closed, and so I am waiting across the street in a rose-colored albeit dilapidated tea house, packed to the gills with fresh college students who, for some reason, all have jonquils on their lapels. Here, on a rickety leather stool by the back door, is where your message has reached me — and first, let me say how sorry I am that you are going through this. In the presence of all these young bodies, taut as bows, I can imagine how intensely you must be feeling.
It reminds me of my breakup with Lyden, a couple decades ago now. Or less of the breakup than of the trip we took several months prior, to some windswept Acadian resort town, where we ate pounds of strawberries and watched, each morning, as the sunrise crowned reality. When Lyden broke up with me and I was alone in my home, I replayed that trip endlessly. I tasted the strawberries, I catalogued the dawn colors, I looked at Lyden’s shoulder peeking out from under the sheets. I replayed it, and then I replayed it the day after, and then again the day after that. Soon, however, I became habituated to the thrills of the first-run details. I moved on — I discovered new, second-run details, new sounds and odors and hues.
Eventually, the wealth of information became tedious. The fine print on the Acadian breakfast menu told me nothing about my former life or why I’d lost Lyden. And so I became recursive: I revisited myself revisiting that trip. I watched how happy I’d been remembering it, in each place that I had chosen to remember it — the long boat ride to see my sister, waiting in line at the municipal building, in reverie after a concert. Then this, too, grew old, and I resorted to studying my memories of those memories: watching myself watch how happy I was, trying to bounce the sunlight off a series of mirrors and thereby coerce a spark from a pine needle.
If reality felt recreated every morning in that Acadian town, how did reality feel now? Vague, pale, gauzy: a hard place in which to orient myself. I forgot what it was about the trip that I had loved. The memory of strawberries, while not spoiled, was no longer fresh. I forgot, except for the mere semantic fact of it, that I had loved Lyden. It was as if I were reading an ancient myth that was missing entire sentences where the tablets had broken.
Some people find this brand of memory overwhelming — the volume of detail it affords, the depth of concentration it requires. Certainly it’s no fun to think about one’s life being abstracted, continuously, losslessly, onto a metal chip. My experience felt closer to depression, though.
Several years after our breakup, Lyden and I met for breakfast. They wore a raincoat and didn’t take it off for the whole meal. They ordered pancakes. Almost everything I said made them giggle. Even though we had both moved on, the morning was sparkling. It felt like reality. And it is only with great force of will that I have avoided remembering it until just now.
The tea has arrived. I don’t know what took so long! The liquid is practically black. The college students have shed their jonquils and are streaming out the door toward the foaming river.
I know that you don’t like to share, that you only told me of your troubles because you felt some sort of obligation. So be it; I won’t ask questions. I hope that my little tale will serve you well in the weeks to come. Your memories are precious. Don’t spend them all at once.