Lost fragments

It seems entirely impossible that now, as I slowly yet unfailingly lose my memory, my power to recollect, to navigate the labyrinths of people, places, times, the smells and sounds of years that roil beneath me like the sea and buoy me up to my present moment--that this curious ability should be stronger now than it has ever been, and strengthening still. Once, striding along the faded lawns of my alma mater, or otherwise enjoying my customary Asbach in an indistinct corner of a campus pub, I might have explained it thus: that as the sphere of human memory diminishes, as once agile neurons turn sluggish and obstinate with age, the sheer number of memories--if one can separate memories--is reduced from the infinite to the merely vast. And, as aging performs its irreversible work, the inchoate shapes and impressions of the past begin, slowly, to appear in their singularity, in the way that constellations gradually surface in the deepening night sky.

This thought may have brought me comfort, sitting enclosed (most likely) in a cloud of my own cigarette smoke, and guessing rhapsodically at truths I could not have hoped to know, though of course I did not need that comfort then. Now, when the one true record of my life seems at risk of erasure, the scientist in me might be reassured by the insistent, universal logic of the process, a charteable perfection: as the breadth of my remembered life decreases, so increases the force and vividness of those memories that remain, the two lines of hairlike thinness crossing somewhere on that infinite plane, extending infinitely. The rational comfort is there, reason's way out; but I find that I am more content to simply wander the well-worn paths I have wandered countless times before, to trace my way back through familiar roads that have led me faithfully to this point.

This is my most beautiful memory. It may be my first, though time has long ceased to be linear--an unsurprising consequence when little lies ahead, and the mind turns back. I am sitting in the garden. Under me is the grass, above the sky. My mother hands me an egg--perhaps it is Easter--and I carry it to where the tulips stand in straight rows, their flowers closed so early in the spring. And here is where memory, that devilish trickster, that laughing ghost, refutes all reason, meaning, sense, for the image of those green stalks arching upward to cupped, yellow hands has endured through all the joy and waste of my life. Of all that I have seen, I know that this will be the last to go: a blue egg, and a perfect yellow bulb.