Dear Heather,
You are my long-term memory.
For someone who notices far too many details, I have an appallingly bad memory. Once events age past a certain date (say, over a week), I start to forget them. People and places blend and fade. This is especially true of the block of time that constitutes our early twenties, although I think alcohol probably had something to do with that. Therefore, I rely on you to reconstruct past events.
My deficiency became especially apparent to me several months ago when you were trying to remind me of a party we attended a long time ago, when we worked at TicketMaster (yes!) and lived in the first post-ghetto apartment. It went something like this:
H: Remember that time I peed my pants while I was standing in front of the toilet?
J: What?! No!
H: Yeah, while you and Paul were downstairs in the laundry room.
J: Me and who?
H: Paul. Playing Ms. Pac Man. It was after that party.
J: Who’s Paul?
H: You don’t remember Paul? He was dating that Clark girl.
J: Who?
I remember more of that night now, although it may be just because you’ve reconstructed it for me. All I remember about Paul was that he was very sweet and had orange hair and a goatee. Apparently, he spent more than one night at our place. It’s news to me.
The cool thing about hearing about all your activities secondhand is that it makes them that much more interesting, and occasionally scandalous. But I’ve found that the end result of all the storytelling is that it’s condensed everything down to one semi-memorable and highly disjointed event. It involves a depressing bar and someone’s bad cover band, far too much alcohol, smutty gossip about coworkers, hugging people I wouldn’t ordinarily want to touch, someone puking in a parking lot, eating the most unhealthy food possible in extremely creative combinations, cuddling with a potted tree while trying to sleep on the floor of a restaurant, riding back to our apartment in the back of someone else’s car, learning too much about other people’s sex lives, getting yelled at by the apartment security guard for putting things in the pool, and some boy coming home and mixing magical drinks with whatever cheap liquor we had on hand. Was that the formula for our nighttime activities, or is that all that’s stuck with me? Who are all those people I spent so much time with, but have now completely erased?
I suspect maybe none of this ever happened and that I’m just your fascinating psychological experiment. In that case, I have to congratulate you. It’s working perfectly.
Love,
Jenni