on memory, wearing heavy boots

Have you ever had a memory come flying out of nowhere and hit you with almost physical force? No obvious trigger to set it off. Totally non sequitur by all conscious counts. One second you're alive and well in the present, and the next you're reliving 1997.

Just had one of those.

I was washing my face, getting ready for bed, when a memory from my childhood crash-landed into my superficial thoughts about my new lipstain and tomorrow's outfit.

I can't have been more than 8. I was visiting my grandparents and overheard a conversation about a neighbor's son who, I was able to gather, had killed himself. It was the first suicide I had ever heard of. I asked the sort of questions I think any curious child would: how did he do it? Why? Don't you get in trouble for doing that?

At my tender age, the only answer I could get was that "he had drunk too much coffee." Now, I was not the brightest child, but I was world-wizened enough to know that coffee did not drive a person to take his own life.

And that's where the memory ends: "he had drunk too much coffee" and my childlike skepticism.

And now it's here, stored in The Cloud.

We sometimes like to think of the Internet as replacing human memory, obviating it, making it obsolete. We no longer need to remember trivia we can find two clicks away on Wikipedia. I can search classics like Brothers Karamazov on Project Gutenberg, meaning I don't have to actually memorize my favorite quotes - they're always accessible. I don't have to remember your birthday - Facebook notifies me in a convenient little box on the side of my screen.

But memory's not going anywhere. It just might work a little differently it did ten or fifty or a hundred years ago. I find that my memory works a bit like a text full of hyperlinks. One idea leads me to another before I've even finished my first thought. This is exactly why my blog posts are usually riddled with parenthetical text. I think memory works on a system of tags. One event in the present tags back to another in the past. I remember a literature professor my very first semester explaining Anna Karenina using this device. All the events in our lives are interconnected, or, perhaps, we weave a network of meaning by subconsciously connecting events.

So wherever that memory of my first encounter with suicide came from, it is somehow connected to whatever I was thinking or feeling or experiencing 42 minutes ago, and is acquiring even more meaning as the basis for this blog post.

Hm. Maybe I should try writing when my mind is functioning at full capacity, and not in the middle of the night.