The Thing That You’ll Miss

The feeling that this moment is an Event, that is the thing that you’ll miss — A deliberate notch in the timeline that makes you immune to forgetting — A thing that won’t dissipate into the outer edges with the other floating minutiae, that will alter and mutate but project out in splashes of color against the grayspace nonetheless — (Waning of vividness, death by desaturation, that’s what forgetting is) — The older you get the harder you hold onto some things and the easier you let other things go — But then you also need more things to replace the ones you let go — Because give it enough time and you’ll end up with one solid cache of Event memory and one blanched expanse of non-memory — And you’ll strain down the frozen memory into a copied-beat outline of a formerly fluid thing — And then it will be a different thing, a flattened approximation of a thing that used to speed your blood — And that’s why we need new memories, so we don’t gut the old ones into dry exoskeletons — But half the things we experience we learn to block out for the sake of our sanity — And shut ourselves into airtight Pope-boxes so we take in everything and experience nothing at all.