of Memory as a feeble reason

 

People often ask me "How do you do, Captain..", to which I generally reply "I'm ok thank you" too early and much before they can finish their question with "..to spend so many long months in Space in that ship of yours without feeling lonely and homesick and nostalgic?", and the reason I do cut their question short with my mundane behavioral answer is because I hate to tell them all how I live of memories, of memories only, of tiny bits of things I've seen and heard and smelt, and generally felt in my times as a feeling animal, (now that I'm no more than a substantive chunk of weight sub-organically cutting its long lost way through Space), and that those memories alone keep me going, or else, living, they keep me living - living, and not going, because in fact I am going nowhere, really.

(Even though this Ship moves, or so it seems.)

Back to the memory talk, it all annoys me mainly because memory itself fools me with its fading insufficiency, up to an extent where I sometimes feel I've lost it, such is the erosion of detail in every recall of a given episode. Take Annelise's face for example. Annelise was a beautiful nordic (Swedish, in fact, Swedish, see, this is annoying: that she was Swedish, this irrelevant fact I'll never forget; but anyway, I was saying, she was a beautiful Swedish) waitress I once picked up in the middle of a busy street in downtown Gothemburg, and we ended up in her bed, a bulky, white bed with smooth fluffy pillows embracing our entwining curl as some lazy cold (but sunny) autumn morning went on carrying its business outside. And in her bed I loved her, I loved very much, oh so much, I loved her so so much, and I know I loved and I know I felt with (and inside) her such a - and my spine trembles, recalling - discharge of everything else that was before, but yes, that love is in my memory now nothing else than the knowledge of having loved her that way, because in reality I don't remember anything about her and the particular way I loved her.

And that, plainly put - and could I not be putting things plain? -, fucking kills me, so much so that I'd almost rather just not even have lived it, because as I was loving her I was loving her also because I loved the fact that I could forever recall that particular feeling! And now time is passing and passing and passing, and the details fade and fade and fade - first went the lines of her face, then her smell, then (it took longer, but also they vanished) those sopranic moans of a lost doggy she made as I stroke her steadily, then her warmth, and her tits, and the colour of her hair - and ultimately all I'm left with is with her nationality and her name; a line in a list of names. 

And I obviously love to know that I once felt what I know I felt, but it frustrates me so much to not be able to feel it again in retrospect; it loses its meaning, really, memory has such a hard time keeping the sensorial details (details?) intact that it becomes just a meaningless string of facts and figures, like a table of achievements and failures reminding me that I lived but not allowing me to recall how I actually fucking did.

So when people ask me how I do it, and although I know that, with all its faults, it's indeed memory that keeps me going (memory as a reminder, but also memory as a guarantee that I might one day feel again), I just tell them "I do feel all that and much more; being the captain of a Spaceships sucks, and it's lonely and dark out there", and I keep from them - from the people that ask - that, despite its miserable forgetting nature, memory is the only proof that me and them - the people, again, those that ask and all the others - have that we actually lived, because - and this I don't need to tell them - whatever we call "present" fades in the exact moment that it exists, given that all that we feel, really, are memories of a moment just gone past.

And the reason I keep it from them, is because, for all it has done for me, I will never do memory enough justice for the essential gift it is, and I'll end up just bitching about its insufficiencies, and I don't want people - the people, ALL PEOPLE, now fuck, stop asking me which people, it's ALL, I mean us ALL - to embitter themselves against memory like me.

Because, you see, I'm a lonely drifter, out here, and all I have on me is memory, and it's too exclusive not to become oppressive, but you all, you're out there, you can build up this exact moment and keep creating memories, you don't need (although it would be nice, I know, I know) to rely on memories to feel alive, or even, to be alive. So you can live healthily with memory and ignore that it'll fade and rot, you can actually use its beauty without even noticing its demons (unlike me).

So yeah, people (which people am I actually talking about, I wonder; who could I possibly be speaking with, apart from poor dumb Marcus?) ask me "How do you do, Captain..." and I wish - oh how I wish - that they would leave it there, the question, or, for that matter, leave themselves there too, meaning, that they would just leave me alone.