Everything leaves a mark. The graze on my foot from a football game a couple of weeks ago has healed, but the skin will never get to how it used to be. Like the many spots gathered all through my life, this, too, will be a memory. Thinking of how all days leave something with you to remember them makes me curious, like a cat tiptoeing towards some tuft floating about on the street, making sure its curiosity does not get the better of it. When the mind forgets, the body remembers. The ghost ache I often feel in my right ankle reminds me of the three and a half years I spent with it hurting, and only when I remind myself it has passed, that the time has passed, that everything that happened in those days has passed, that the pain has passed, does it leave. And often, I have to do this, and it intrigues me beyond measure. Psychosomatic, they call it, of the body and the mind. And perhaps, the most crucial thing out of this train of thought is that everything ends, mark or no mark. When things end, new things begin. It is a cycle as old as time itself, and it is a cycle deeply personal, and it is a cycle profoundly universal, and all we can do is revel in this, in this big magic of all that happens to us and all that we remember.
And when it comes to remembering, by the great gifts of evolution, we remember the worse parts more vividly than we do the better ones. It was, after all, crucial for those who came before to remember that one of their own was eaten by some beast at the pond. Safe nights were forgotten for their lack of information. And this instinct prevails, but we must resist it now, living as we are. We must remember the good. We must write it down. We must look at the details when laughter echoes around. The colour of the curtains, the strange song playing far away, the taste of sushi you do not remember ordering, the coy remark which took the table by surprise, the friend who arrived late walking towards you while lying out of their teeth, the bits we tend to gloss over, we must remember all of them. This is how we survive in this age when the hazards have left the pond and have moved into our minds.