Poof!

I was writing today to a friend from whom I have not heard in months. To sum up what had happened in the meantime, I said, "I put my head down, and when I looked up again, months had passed." It seems strange that all of this time since I got to Boston would have gone by so quickly; as it was happening it seemed like it would go on forever. There have been some really long days and a lot of experiences that I'd rather not re-live. It passed all the same.
My ex-girlfriend Anna told me once that the thing that's nice about dating somebody is that you have some frame of reference for your experiences. You can say, "I did this!" and experience the validation of somebody else saying, "Yes! It's true! I was there. It truly was grand!" This is a profound insight, I think, into why people couple themselves off in the first place. Surely it's better to have a record. Memories, like photographs (or journal entries), create a better picture of the past if they exist in plentitude. Isn't it a fantastic thing about memory that if you don't take pains to cast a memory somehow, it'll simply disappear.
Well, just the things you did alone will disappear. If you've got friends and loved ones, they will share some of the burden of remembering things that you would otherwise forget. My sister and her boyfriend remember things about France that left my mind long ago. Maybe you don't really need a boyfriend or girlfriend. Maybe they just condense a process that occurs with every human with whom you come into contact.
if that's the case, you deserve some thanks. Thank you for coming here and reading, for caring enough to want to remember. It means a lot to me, though I say very little about it.