I find myself chasing memories. As if playing hide and seek. I am always the seeker. I don’t get to hide.
I imagine these memories floating around in my head like some amorphous nebula. Most of it is a blur, speeding by as I try and pluck something into stillness.
Actively trying to remember works sometimes. It seems like more and more a struggle as time passes. Sometimes I’m left with just memories of memories. I remember having remembered it, but I can’t reach it now. Is it gone forever?
Other times some adjacent memories will return with no warning. I was reaching for something else and now I have this one. I wonder what to do with it. Once I let it go now I wonder if it’ll ever return. I wonder how true it is. Maybe I’ve revised it over time to be something more suitable to who I am now.
Right now, for no particular reason, I’m trying to remember two names. Friends from high school who I haven’t seen since. I remember some vague specifics, but not their names.
One friend was a tall brown boy. He was legally-blind. We’d hangout on and off during lunch breaks and we were in the computer council. This one time I had sprained my ankle playing basketball in gym class. I remember him helping me from the gym to… I don’t remember where. My hand around his shoulder as I was hopped on my good leg. As we passed by the library I remember some kids telling me how silly I looked hopping on one leg. They told me to use the sprained ankle but not put too much weight on it. I remember all this some how – bit and pieces – but I don’t remember his name.
The other friend was a goth-ish white girl. We were just in one or two classes together. English was one of them. We had developed nicknames for each other. We would yell them to each other whenever we saw each other in the hallways. We continued to do this long after we were in classes together. I remember her hair and that nonchalance in the way she walked. But I don’t remember her name, nor the nicknames we had.
Did they even have names? Were we even friends? Did this even happen?
Perhaps I could look them up in a year book. Just that I never bought a year book.
What would I even do with their names?