[ Wp ] Every night , you take out a memory and put it in a container

Every night I feel them leaking away -- like the day never happened. The morning turns to fog and the afternoon begins to crumble. Breakfast never happened. It ’ s a scramble if the one thing I want to hold on to happens in the morning because every single day is like sand in an hour glass just waiting to be turned over and used again tomorrow. 
 
 
 Used and reused. 
 
 
 Recycled. 
 
 
 I ’ m a collection of small fragments. Everything I know about myself, my life, has been gathered and collected and curated like the finest museum on the planet. The Museum of Me. And it ’ s exactly like that when I wake up. It ’ s a single moment of paintings, moving pictures meant to represent perhaps exactly what they are or maybe something more depending on my specific insight. Read into the trees enough and you can learn a lot because that oak, god, it ’ s exactly like the one in the painting from Thursday, October 29th 1992 when I was five. The one with the swingset. Even though that oak is in the little fragment of motion picture from Thursday, January 15th 2014 when I was seventeen and walking through the part with a blond girl. 
 
 
 The next fragment, it tells me that I really cared about that girl. 
 
 
 But the fragments that follow don ’ t have her so I don ’ t know if she matters anymore. 
 
 
 Somedays I just sit in bed, wasting away my morning, slowly forgetting about the sunrise and the way that the rays reflect over the lake. I kept that memory once. I kept it over a memory that seemed insignificant at the time, one I don ’ t remember, but I picked that little piece of life that happens every day to store away and I ’ ve felt like something was missing ever since then. Somedays, I run to my room and pull a memory before it starts to leak. Like that morning my mother made me breakfast on my birthday. My eyes opened to the sight of my dog closing in, licking my face until I shoved him back onto my bed and off of my chest. It ’ s like a movie, you know, when I watch it happen again. Every single detail is clear. The way my mother smiled at me once I ’ d managed to pull the salivating fur ball from my body, calling his name with a newly teenaged whine, going, “ Buddy, Buddy, stop it. Gross. ” Voice cracking and my mom just standing there smiling. 
 
 
 The smell of ham filled my room. 
 
 
 Who knows what I gave up to keep that memory but I know, from both my saved memory from my eighth birthday and sixteenth birthday, that I go to my grandparents ’ house every year until late. Until the time when them morning starts to slip away from me. 
 
 
 It ’ s a condition, they said. 
 
 
 I kept that memory. Friday July 12th, 1991. It ’ s the first memory I have, the first one to even make it into the jar. This big giant doctor in a white coat explaining the condition and what I ’ d need to do to have any idea exactly who I was. Who I am. This huge man telling me that I get to pick one memory each day and, like building blocks or Lego, I ’ ll start constructing myself. He said I needed to choose carefully. 
 
 
 So, every night, that ’ s what I do. Tactfully pulling the parts of me that will make the best me. Curated personality. Constructed from whatever I want to keep.
