At once timeless and fleeting, a memory is the most painful reminder of what once was.
Material things can be trusted - trusted to be there, to evoke a familiar feeling in the pit of your throat, to make your hands reach out and feel them and amaze at how they felt exactly the same so many years back. If only for the part of the universe that can be felt and touched and seen, time flows backwards and stops at that precise moment when your friends first handed you that card and that last time you proudly wore that jersey. Time stops - yes - and that wonderful trickster that we call our heart will relive those moments, and as Thomas Hardy said, "Maybe, what as interlude / I feign, I shall believe." Slowly the day, time and hour comes back to you as a throbbing in your head and a catch in your voice, a pathetic slowness in your step. The time that retracted itself rushes back like a tightly wound spring and we are left not unlike on a rollercoaster - neither here nor there just an aching emptiness that slowly closes.
A memory, however, is a slightly different thing. It does not transport, nor does it relive. There are no gradual reminiscences and piecemeal collaboration of hazy thoughts. Time does not rewind - it jumps. Backward, and back again. For a split second, everything flashes, crystal clear, lovingly familiar and untouched by the malignant claws of that Old Hag they call Time. Sight, smell, taste, touch all return, or maybe YOU are back there. You can feel the sweat pouring down as you shout in jubilation, you can feel the agony of another ligament twisting, the frustration of another romance foiled. Then it's gone. The present does not pull you back, slowly, then rapidly - no spring action for a memory, no. It's just gone. You wonder if it even happened, this eerie vision. But it did. The senses are proof enough - each saturated with familiarity, the state variables that from a million different combinations picked the right one. Senses that drip with vividness, and grief. The memory lives and dies like a firefly - ethereal, ephemeral. Leaving behind not grief and emptiness alone, but senses that reach for something and grab in the dark for that which was never there.
