i am terrified of forgetting.

when i was small and lying in bed alone in the dark, i didn’t worry about monsters or ghosts. i worried about what would happen if i lived my life and then died and was reborn, and that someday i could be this totally different person who would have no recollection of this, my present life. the thought haunted me - it made me cry sometimes - and i’m still completely unsettled when i think about it today.

i live halfway in the past. i’m obsessed with holding on to tiny details about the things that have happened to me.

i reminisce and i repeat and i recall and i retell.

my mother says i’m too young to be nostalgic. is nineteen too young? is it morbid to cling, at my age, so desperately to my past, to constantly be afraid of forgetting everything that’s made me me?

i don’t know. i do know that, yes, memory can be treacherous. it can change, inception-style. it can fool you, and disturb you, and you can believe something for years and then find out that you imagined it. it can come back to haunt you when you walk into a room that smells like your favourite aunt’s old house and you’re suddenly reduced to tears. living in the past, as Dumbledore says about dreams, “does not do” - especially if, in the process, you “forget to live”.

but memory is also so powerful, and in such startlingly wonderful ways. it can make things that aren’t yours belong solely, uniquely, magically to you - the song your father sang you to sleep with. the book you read sitting under a tree listening to A Fine Frenzy on your iPod. the road you took to school every day, the view from your verandah, the movie that made you cry even though everyone else found it funny, the combination of pancakes and orange juice that you ate on the first day of college and will now forever be associated with the nervousness and anxiety you felt that day.

it can keep things alive which aren’t anymore. you remember your first dog’s eyes, your second dog’s fur. the touch of your great-grandmother’s hand, the blueprint of the house you moved out of, the teachers who don’t teach you anymore and the fact that you believed in the tooth fairy and the time you woke up at the crack of dawn to see what Santa left you, and cried because you didn’t realise that the stocking was empty only because the lightsaber wouldn’t fit into it.

it can make you remember the things that made you who you are today. the teacher who made you cry, the friends who made you whole, the book that made you decide to major in literature, the music that kept you happy. the good and the bad and the right and the wrong, the embarrassing memories that make you visibly cringe and the heartbreaking ones that make you cry. i think they’re all so incredibly, incredibly important - and you can call me nostalgic and sentimental and pathetic, but for as long as i can,

i will reminisce and i will repeat and i will recall and i will retell.

and i will remember.