The Writer
There was once a man who could only remember what he wrote...
I am a brilliant and prolific writer.
I write everything worth remembering, and adamantly forget the rest. Names of friends, grocery lists, administrative tasks, home improvement plans - all relegated to sticky notes littered across my modest London flat. When I no longer need to remember, I simply throw the thing into the hearth and move on with more writing.
As it turns out, there are a lot of things to remember, and I wind up writing at a near constant rate. An idea occurs to me in the shower and I quickly take up my waterproof pad and jot it down as the water slides off my back. I notice a new stationary story on the route my bus takes every day on the way to work so I stop what I was writing to write this instead, often in the margins of that which I was working on.
Writing is my access to my memory, the control levers of my perception.
I suppose there are some negative components to this lifestyle, but I've forgotten most of them at this rate. Mainly, I've noticed some confusion slowly creeping into my mind upon waking, as I stare groggily at the note covered walls, cork boards, and piles of dusty journals stacked all around my bedroom. For a moment, I wonder why all of these things are cluttering my space so much, and then I realize that in fact, I must be a brilliant and prolific writer. Then it springs back into motion, this mind eagerly capturing the most important elements of my life.
Sometimes it's not so simple to know what to remember and what to forget. I spent three months losing track of a jar of jam before I began writing all of the labels, which I very much cannot do without. I imagine there are details about friends and family I'm not privy to, information shared in a brief moment that was superseded by something more worthy of being written.
In my work as a stenographer, I have been forced to remember the most banal and irrelevant things; dates for follow-up hearings, oddly named law firms, minute details regarding some poor couple's divorce proceedings. These details, so enshrined by the practice of law, fill my mind unnecessarily until eventually they're overwritten by the next arbitrary serial number on the latest assailant's gun.
The workings of my memory are unclear. Most things I write stay in mind for quite some time, but in my daily review of my most important writings, I do sense when the memories themselves begin to fade. I catch a glimpse of a note regarding my low blood sugar and pause, unsure who wrote this and why. When this happens, I quickly jot it down once again, and it becomes immediately clear to me that, oh yes, I am a diabetic.
Things like this are what caused me to purchase the beautiful leather bound book that I write this in now. I awake every day and write all of these things down, repeatedly, often referring to the previous day's writing - ah, I see I have actually left one thing out...
I am a brilliant and prolific writer, with a degenerative neurological condition.
I forget everything that I do not write. And because I must write, whether for work or life, there's not much time or space for anything else. I live alone because I forgot about my wife. I know nothing other than the essential components of my daily routine. And above all things, I desperately protect my hands and my sight.
Without both, I'm not sure I would be able to be me anymore... but anyway, I must go to work promptly at eight in the morning, I must cook for myself and make sure to avoid excessive fats. I have one remaining parent, but can't remember...
