Memory Keeper

The bane of my life has been my memory. I forget. I forget prodigiously. Names, faces, conversations. Don’t even get me to started on dates and numbers, groan. In office, at home, I struggle with narrating incidents, at remembering places, things we saw and ate at specific places.

On the other hand, I had a girl who worked for me who, after a decade, still remembered the make of the shirt and the colour of socks I’d worn when I’d first interviewed her.

I guess there are bigger tragedies in life (people are still dying hungry!), but more than a patchy whitewash of remembrance, this creates a strange spiritual hole in me, which I carry as regret inside me.

But on the flip side, I have also forgotten grievances and regrets, I forget details of battles, I’ve forgotten details of when friends had tried to pull fast ones on me, the pain some had left, the times I’d weeped into the night because words had hurt. I’d forgotten the details, soon I’d forgotten who’d said or done what.

Forgetfulness then is just another way for forgiveness. 

But there are deeper cuts.

I’ve forgotten details of the afternoon when my son was born, I’ve forgotten the look on my dad’s face (ecstatic I’m told) when I’d passed my first professional exams. Or my mother’s hug (unending, I’m told) when she held the first copy of my first book. I’ve forgotten words spoken softly to me, poems written for me, silences I’ve shared, the memories of hands held in crowded rooms, playing the fool, the hi jinks.

The entirety of what is gone is like a lost country of reminiscence.

And that hurts.

What then remains is an existential mystery, where I pathetically flounder inside the lost meadows of my own heart. My happiness itself seems ragged and pockmarked and I walk around within a permanent cave of dissatisfaction.

I wish sometime I had a memory keeper, like the old royalty had - someone doing a record-keeping celestially or by being beside me!

This poem is then a seeking of a blessing,  a gently yearning desire to remember, and if that’s not possible, have someone I  love to remember for me.

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The poem -

She said she'd dressed up for me -

and why not? I said she smelt nice. 

I had her body close to mine 

as she put her head on my shoulder

and we looked into the greens 

and the water sprayers and the cranes.

It was quiet. It was just an ordinary while.

And we didn't bother the moments too much,

letting them be, stop, and find 

their drunken passage on their own. 

.

Sometimes, I felt, feelings grow in emptiness,

when we try the least,  

when we are not seekers,

when we don't bother about 

discovering each other. 

.

She opened her shoes 

to walk barefoot on the grass.

She held on, as she stumbled. 

She said she remembered everything,

I said my memory is a sieve, and

she said I was lucky, as I didn't have memory of pain. 

I looked at her face, wet with spray,

at the thickets where magpies hopped,

at how evening came as red-blooded life,

at how the trees were looking on as compatriots -

and I was close to tears to think 

I would soon forget it all. 

She linked her fingers to mine, 

put her left cheek to mine, 

and said -

I can be your memory-keeper,

why worry - I will be your memory-keeper.

Hear the poem:

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If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the hauntings of memory:

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