It’s strange how the memory works. Everything is stored in there somewhere – and for some of us, there is a more enduring filofax than for others. I remember everything – but sometimes I completely forget – or actually store information and memories deep in the brain’s darkest recesses, conjured up only when randomly triggered.
Today, watching a moment of BBC News, they interviewed an Icelander, and I gasped realizing that I knew him. Not because it’s so unusual to know many, many of the very few Icelanders there are if you lived in Iceland, as I did, but more because I had forgotten how deeply offended I was by this particular person’s behavior toward me; how disposable I had been; how boring he had been. I had virtually forgotten him and the whole rigmarole around our brief acquaintance, all of which took place in this wilder, risk-taking period of my life, before I had ever fallen in love, before I had ever had my heart broken, before I had moved away from Iceland forever, even before I had moved to Iceland for the second time for what was a long second (and final) act in the Icelandic phase of my life. I suppose because I had been young and there was so much life to live between then and now, it makes sense that someone so inconsequential would be filed away among inconsequential memories.