Recently, I feel like I'm losing my memory. I have parts of memories, but I can't reconstruct the details. The parts of the memories I do recall are vivid, which convinces me that they are based on real experiences, but I doubt their veracity because I can't connect them to any specific times or individuals.
For instance, the other night, I woke up noticing a very distinct smell (whether it was a smell in my house or a smell from my dreaming, I can't be sure). The smell was sweet and familiar and attached to a very specific memory. The only problem was I couldn't identify the smell or attach it to any specific event.
And another: In the middle of the day, for no reason, I remembered some road trip I took with some guy (I'm assuming an ex-boyfriend) where we stopped at a gas station for road snacks. The some guy was delighted when he saw the shop had Idaho Spud bars. He told me how much he had loved them when he was a kid and how he hadn't had one in years. He bought two and ate both of them on the way home. I told him about how my aunt had sent us a box of Idaho Spud bars for Christmas one year. I vividly remember driving in the car with this mystery guy and I can remember tasting a piece of his candy bar. All of it is perfectly vivid (the tastes, the smells, the sounds) but I can't remember (even though I have racked my brain and even asked the most recent ex) who the guy was. So, did this event not really happen? Did I just dream it? It's so trivial and ultimately doesn't matter but it makes memory seems so unreliable, so useless.
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What I want to know is why one remembers bad/embarassing experiences far more than the good ones. I'm sure it is biological, but it sure is disconcerting.
One of my friends was talking about how the brain processes positive and negative things; how after a while we get used to the positive stuff and expect it...and it doesn't give us that exuberant high like it used to....but that we have an infinite capacity for negativeness. It always hurts when you are humiliated publicly or rejected in love. Maybe that's why the awful stuff is more easily accessible in memory...b/c it's burned in there more deeply.
Oh, the humiliations of the past, how they still sting.
Even though the memory slippage is unsettling and kind of maddening, it's also a kind of interesting puzzle, isn't it? The vividness of certain memories has come to seem like a treasure to me. My personal favorite memory phenomenon is waking up from a dream that is so vivid that it seems to suffuse the day. The brain is deeply weird.
I had a dream Friday night that I had published a book of poetry, yet failed to put it on my CV. I found it in my house and started looking at it. "Oh! I forgot about this!" It was like I'd never seen it before.
What does this mean?
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