Memory.

Human memory is nothing more than a personal interpretation of events.

Danny had read this in a book once. Some psychoanalyst or whatever had said it. For some reason it had jumped out at him, and he spent a great deal of time (and brainpower) from then pondering just what it meant to him. The more he did think, the more it made sense in relation to his own sense of memory.

You see, Danny didn’t have a memory. Not one that could be considered functional, anyway. He had so much trouble remembering things that he’d come to think of it as some kind of medical thing. He’d submitted himself to a-hundred-and-one tests as a result; cognitive stuff, surgical stuff. They’d tried some pretty risky things too, such as shock therapy, and yet they couldn’t find a single thing physiologically wrong with him. He moved on to psych tests, but they also proved fruitless. The doctors just sent him on his way.

It wasn’t as if Danny hadn’t experienced anything in life, for after all, memories are indeed born of experiences. The things he had gone through couldn’t either be dismissed as unmemorable, for he’d gone through quite a bit in his thirty-odd years. The good – meeting his wife, his travels; the bad – his wife’s infidelity, losing his dream job; the ugly – a certain friend’s wedding party. But none of it seemed to stick in his mind, and when he looked at photos of an event all that he felt was blurred brain vision and the oncomings of a headache. He’d read quite a lot of science-fiction as a kid, and often wondered whether there was some kind of Total Recall shit going on.

Most of the time, having no memory frustrated the hell out of him. It made getting a decent job almost impossible, and forging relationships with people even more so – especially when he couldn’t remember a girl’s name on a second date which followed a first he had no recollection of. It had taken him a while to come up with the idea of carrying a small notebook and pen with him to jot the important things down. At first it wasn’t such a bad idea; that was until he began to forget to pick up the notebook.

It wasn’t all bad though. It did keep his life relatively simple. None of the complications or overanalysing that he felt normal people suffered from, that he certainly suffered from before. He’d watch people while sitting in a coffee shop or a park, feel pity for them and then forget why he felt that way. And, of course, the biggest benefit to him was the absence of any kind of anger or sorrow, at least in a long-term sense. He just couldn’t remember things well enough to apply those kinds of feelings to them.

And so he went about his life day-to-day, often lamenting his lack of a memory, but often content at seeing things as they were, without looking for deeper meanings or labelling things. He’d see a mother pushing her daughter along the street in her pushchair, or a father lifting his son onto the swings in the park. He’d listen to old men talking on a bench on the market square, or women gossiping in a supermarket aisle. He’d feed the pigeons and water his plants, doing all these with a smile on his face.

He learned to see that he didn’t always need to remember. It was enough to move from one experience to the next, without dwelling on them, enjoying them merely as they came along, the fleeting moments in time they really were. He lived with the kind of peace a lot of normal people spent years trying to attain.

And he was happy.