My memory captures the shiny, pretty, easy things and lets the rest drop away.
It’s finicky.
I remember the night I met Ana. She and a common friend were driving a beat-up two-wheeler while I was standing in the middle of the road with two sisters that had been to a music concert with me — The stud that I was.
They pull over on the side and ask us if we needed them to get a three-wheeler auto from ahead, and the girl I kept hearing about was suddenly real, standing right across from me.
I vaguely remember saying hello.
Her face was lit intermittently by the streetlamps.
Flash — high cheekbones, Flash — Pale skin, Flash — The eyes. Those big kind eyes.
I don’t remember every place that I have visited in my life, but I remember how she looked like on that one night, in the summer of 1996.
Memory is stubborn, revisionist, and fickle. Everything I’m about to tell you is subject to persuasion, bias, and desire as much as any history is.
It is singularly one-sided.
Time molds things retroactively, usually into what we wanted them to be.
Time — the things we think it takes from us — allows us the dramas of our lives.
I’ve tried to remember everything that mattered, even those things I didn’t want to remember.
There are things that have happened that I am still not ready to put on paper — yet. But for the things that I do, the attempt is to be as faithful as possible.
Most of all, I’ve tried to figure out how to tell a story..
that is not strictly mine.
