stupid memory

Thinking about writing it down seems pretentious
And helplessness may be the word they nail to my name in a while
Stupid memory
Must you bring up these things?
Stupid memory
Can I forget all of that?
All of that crap

thinking about words today, and writing, and memory.
i finally caved in and brought my broken and thrice disemboweled laptop to work for it's third professional opinion about whether or not i should hold out any hope for the retrieval of the contents of my hard drive.

as i sat on the train to work this morning with my laptop at my feet, pondering how much those stories are worth to me. how much? how much would i pay to have some techie in a hazmat suit take my little hard drive disk into a sterile room and tweezer my silly writings and stories out of the 'corrupt' memory of my once trusty computer.

i poured my most scandel-twinged stories and secretly secret journal entries into my computer. i didn't save a back-up copy, because that would be dangerous. i didn't want any of these to leak or be stumbled upon someday by someone to whom i lent a thumb drive.

which is to say, there are really only 2 files over which i will grieve now that i know that they cannot be expunged without approximately $3000 of extra cash.

one was a file of half started short stories. the stories that i actually thought i could turn into something.

the other was the 11 or so single-spaced pages of the summer 2 years ago i kept my journal in third person omnicient. i was narrating my own life, as a literary exercise. it was sort of a mess, and needed a lot of editing, but Lord help me, a lot of crazy interesting scandelous things happened that summer. my heart breaks a little bit at the thought of never reading those stories again. i didn't keep a paper journal from Memorial Day through Labor Day that year, so that now non-existant file is the only record of those crazy months.

the summer when the Epic Ex got in the bike accidents, and what happened after
grad school entanglements and near disasters
the summer that The Boy and i first started to go from 'friends' to 'what the f*%k?'
a summer of accidental betrayals and intentional drama and numbness and tears
the summer of shared beds and parties gone awry and what may be long remembered, even without the journal, as one of the weirdest days of my life

i wrote about all those things, and quotidian non-drama, as a story. a story about someone. with chunks of actual dialogue and narration. sigh. gone now.

but then, as 'fate would have it', or i could steal a line from 'stranger than fiction' and call it 'little did she know'...i happened to read a section of my optimisim experiment research book "stumbling on happiness" this morning that says, in a nutshell, that scientific studies have shown that we do not actually remember our experiences as they happen, (duh) but AS THE WAY WE TOLD THEM. the words we used. the way we described something.

in a great little study, researchers showed that research subjects who verbally described or wrote about a color swatch they were asked to remember were LESS accurate in picking that color out of a color swatch line up (only 30 seconds after their original swatch was hidden) than the people who were just asked to remember the color and not talk or write about it.

so what? well, for me it was one of those non-coincidental coincidences that put an entirely new spin and sparkling lightness to the fact that my summer journal is gone for good: remembering through words 'corrupts' the actual memory - just as my corrupted hard drive ate the files to begin with.

perhaps it is time, dear friends, to let go of that crazy summer. keep the little trinkets of the actual memories of Epic Ex's creaky-voice and pained breathing on the phone as we talked about his accident. to feel in my memory the magical non-magic of praying for the random ambulance the day before as it ran screaming from the lake front, not realizing until his call that i had actually prayed for him.

maybe its time to nestle the smell of cigarettes and jack and cokes and borrowed cashmere sweaters and things that shouldn't have been said and nuzzling that was best left to the other girls and the weirdest day of my life into the little box of my actual memory, and forget about the pages where they used to live.

forget about the friend drama, now smoothed.
forget about the piles of words and sentences and pages of self-indulgence and let them be.

let them be forgotten! maybe the real memories will get stronger, now that their competition is finally knocked out of contention.

goodbye, sweet summer of weirdness. maybe i will remember you some day.