Lately I've been thinking about people I haven't quite forgotten, but parts of them are fading away, merging with someone else--a woman whose name might be Sam, a man whose face belongs to someone else, but every time I try to make it resolve into the right one my memory rebels. "That isn't right. You're looking for this other man's face." And it's wrong, it's always wrong, but this person, however often you saw them and interacted with them, have faded away. Memory is fragile like that.
What makes it all the stranger is knowing those memories are still locked away in there, somewhere. Memories never really go away, they just get misfiled; what you're really forgetting is how to access what you need. (And, of course, how every time you access a memory it changes. How fragile even the most indelible memories we have must be.)
And somewhere out there someone right now is struggling to remember my name, or my face, or even why I lingered in their memory, what strange thing has prompted me to resurface in their memories. It takes so little for us to drift apart, and even less for the threads that tie us together, the memory of a shared history, to dissolve, brushed aside like so many cobwebs.
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