Theatrical Muse Reboot - #74 - If you could only carry one memory with you into the afterlife...
Only one? Christ. What a miserable afterlife.
See, memories are one of those things I can't do without. Some people have really rotten memories and seem to be perfectly happy with the moments of their lives slipping through their fingers and their hands and through the cracks in their brains until they're gone. I guess when you don't have any other option it's easier not to get upset about it. Don't get riled about what you can't change, which is a basic paraphrasing of something my father says all the time. He has a point on that one, at least on some level. But me, my memory is different.
I don't forgot hardly ANYTHING. I have what's medically referred to as an eidetic memory, that most people call a photographic memory. I'm one of those people who can read a book once, close my eyes, and more or less reliably recall the information. Sometimes word for word. It's kind of freakish, I guess, but it's one of those things I've always been able to do and for a long time I figured that's how everyone's memories work. (It turns out that's not at all true, and as a child I found that very frustrating). Of course sometimes I do forget things, but it's rare, and I tend to collect like a neverending repository every useless bit of information I ever absorb as much as the things that most people would call big ticket items. If I go out of my way to take a 'snapshot' of information I am trying to learn, I have a retention rate that's damn near one hundred percent. I can play the 'video' forward, backwards, with or without sound, reel it over and over and examine it for every nitpicky detail in the memory. Again, I suppose kind of freakish, but to me it's normal. It's all you people with swiss cheese for brains that are the freaks, as far as I'm concerned.
Anyway, being that my memory is what it is and I'm so big on history, it's probably unsurprising that memories are a big deal to me. History is important. We need to remember it, and learn from it. Personal history is the very first part of that importance. Without a memory, of course, you have no access to your personal history...and frankly that thought itself scares me a lot more than a great deal of other thoughts I could have at any particular moment.
I don't think about the afterlife much. I don't think there is one for werewolves, at least not where we remain functionally or essentially the same being we were in life. But I think any afterlife where I could only have one memory with me would be hell. Or maybe it wouldn't count as an afterlife at all. We are, after all, a summation of the experiences that we went through between when we were born and the moment we're in. If we have no experiences to draw from, nothing but one lonely fact that's overridden everything else in our brains...well, we aren't really US, are we? If I can only remember how to sing, but not how to drive or shift or who Alan and Rudy and Kat and Tim are...I'm not really Martin Grey. I'm some distilled concept of Martin Grey's ability to sing, which is a mighty thing if I do say so myself but it's also just a facet of what I really am. I turn into a shadow of myself if I only have one memory to access.
Then again, if I only have one memory, maybe it wouldn't be the memory that I USED to know other things. I'd stop being Martin, stop deserving anything near to the name 'Sly', but maybe I wouldn't be miserable or scared. Ignorance, as they say, is bliss. If I don't know what I'm missing, I can't actually miss it, can I? I'd be happy and ignorant and stupid and /not myself/, floating around in the Echo like a shard of the original. Shit, maybe that's what really happens to werewolves when we go. Maybe we're a bunch of cannibals, endlessly killing the spirits of those who came before us.
Goddamn. This is going to keep me up at night. I'm going to wake up in a cold sweat worried I'll spontaneously forget everything I ever was, I just know it. Shit.