~~PROPERTY OF RAY SMITH~~

~~PROPERTY OF RAY SMITH~~

Memories are the foundation of what we base our perception of reality and even our own selves off of, and those memories ultimately make up who we are and how we interact with our external world. Recently, I feel that I've been forgetting many of mine. You always expect that when you forget something like a major memory, you can feel that something is missing. I've learned that often times you don't even notice you're forgetting something until something comes up to suggest that you should know what it is, but you simply don't.

Like waking up in a bedroom you don't recognise after a night out of drinking. You can remember going out to the bar with your friends, you can remember talking and laughing, and you remember this person you didn't know coming and talking to you. You know you keep drinking with them, but you don't actually remember much past that point. You can assume you slept with whoever you were talking to before your memory runs a blank, but you don't know for certain.

Next comes what I tend to think of as the most terrifying part of the process.

Later in the day you talk to the friends you went out with again, and they fill in some blanks for you. You now know you actually went to a hotel with someone else who wore an outfit absolutely blindingly neon orange, definitely not the person you remember talking to. You look through your phone, checking your camera roll and texts. You see a couple videos of yourself very drunkenly dancing with your friends and someone wearing neon orange, but there's always too much movement and poor lighting for you to recognize a their face. You also see some texts from an unknown number talking about how wild last night was, and how they are they ran into you. Based on all the information you collected, you assume this unknown number is the person who was wearing neon orange, the two of went back to the hotel and slept together, and they left before you woke up.

When you retell this story in the future you say that you were talking to this really cool person who you got bored of after 10 minutes before your friends, being the saviors they are, dragged you away from them and you all started dancing. It didn't take long after that for this really attractive person with admittedly bad clothing taste started dancing with you. One thing lead to another and you ended up sleeping with them in the hotel, giving them your number before they left.

The actual events of that night looked more like this: The person you remember talking to got wine spilt on them and left the bar in a huff. Shortly after your friends dragged you up and you all started dancing. Next, you see your brothers ex in the bar, and drag them up to start dancing too (you had always liked this ex). The two of you leave the bar together and stumble drunkenly through downtown as you talk about your brother. By pure bad luck your brother spots the two of you while driving, pulls over, astounded to see the two of you together. His ex says they have a hotel room booked, and your brother agrees to give his ex a ride there, and offer's you his couch to sleep on. By the time you get to the hotel your brother and the ex don't seem to be very broken up anymore. The ex gives you the room key, and you stay in their hotel room while your brother and the ex meant to go back to your brother's place first, but don't quite make it that far. The text you receive the next morning from an unknown number is your brother, who's number you never saved out of spite.

The human ability to completely forget memories without a trace and rewrite memories scares me more than death; more than life.

I am no author, but I need to get this written down. I don't want to forget who I am.