I had written a long story about myself a few months ago that was fairly personal and I ultimately decided not to post it online even though I know basically everyone who reads what I write and I wouldn’t really care if they saw it. I also didn’t actually finish it; I wrote half of it out for real and then finished it in my head. I was quite satisfied with the ending and cried a little. It had helped me discover a hidden truth within myself.

I overthink and mull over things that have happened to me and things I have done a little too much, which calcifies those memories in my head. I do this less now, but I did it a lot and I have very vivid (though probably inaccurate) memories of minute meaningless events that made me feel even a little bit awkward. An example instantly pops in my head: I yawned in a store once and had my mouth open wide and as I was finishing the yawn I locked eyes with a girl around my age and she looked at me funny. I still remember where I was standing in the store when that happened, because I had replayed it in my head probably over 500 times in the hour following it. Anyway, writing that story helped me realize that, despite having a consistent string of those types of memories following my entire life up until today, I actually am able to forget things, good and bad. There’s some good memories I had when I was much younger that might be core to who I am that I just can’t remember right now.

The reason I was thinking about this again was due to meeting with a friend I hadn’t talked to much since high school. We had met once or twice since to catch up, which at first covered what we’d done in the time we hadn’t seen each other, but on the second and third time (I guess this is the third time) also included catching up on the last few times we had caught up with each other. I hate that by the way, if we have to “catch up” it’s only if we haven’t talked for five years. Otherwise just pretend like you saw me last week.

They had told me shortly after we got ice cream (I got vanilla soft serve ice cream, and it’s OK that I did that) something to the effect of “Once I left high school, I was so relieved to be done with all of that and forget all of it!” to which I went “Yeah.” And I said “Yeah.” because, yeah, I did think that too, but only within the year after I graduated. Now, listening to him say it, I don’t remember that feeling at all. Actually, most of my memories of high school have been overwritten by bizarre fake dream versions of it where I’m going back to it to take college credits and I’m late for all my classes, oh and also I have to go to work after I take this test. After ice cream we actually we up to our high school to walk around and I almost verbalized a question about the elevator to the third floor where all the college art 101 classes are held. That would have been embarrassing.

My “Yeah.” was followed by them contradicting their first statement by recalling in detail various things that again, I hadn’t thought about in a long time and, again, could barely remember. Despite having had my revelation earlier that year that my brain can actually forget information that’s not useful to me, I was still really shocked at how much I had no idea what this person was talking about. I definitely still have bad memories stuck in my head, but again I found myself having trouble picking back up some that I at least have memory of mulling over. I wish I could have told them in a way that sounded normal that everything they spent the last hour talking to me about they should just forget about like I did on accident. It was clearly still bugging them, but maybe they’ll forget about it too eventually. Maybe they’ll forget about me too.