Jason

I don’t want to forget him forever. Just for a little bit. Enough to make the pain go away. Just for a while. So, I can sleep. And eat. And breathe. And be okay.

I close my eyes and use voice command to navigate to his folder. I find it and hold my hand over my mouth to suppress a sob as a few memories pop up at a time. Us at the fair on our first date. The first time he said he loved me. The squeal of our car wheels, before we crashed. “Jason,” I cry.

I set the time. Two hours. I let out a shuddering breath. A pop-up, message appears. And I give verbal confirmation. It takes a little while to load. And after a minute I forget. Jason Stone, the love of my life, means nothing to me. I don’t know that he’s dead anymore. I don’t even know that I’m meant to miss him.

+++

I wake up a little groggy after the reset but smiling. It’s sunny out. I think I might forget my errands for the day, and just sit out with a good book. I look around my dorm for a while, checking for one in particular, Jane Eyre, my personal favourite. But I can’t seem to find it.

I have some foggy notion that I might have lent it out to someone. But that seems ludicrous. Who in the hell would I have trusted with my first edition?! I glance at the other bunk in my room; maybe Abby moved it. I’ll interrogate her later.

I shrug my shoulders, not sure what else I can do, and pick up ‘Persuasion’ instead. You can never go wrong with Austen.

I walk through the dorm hallway. And immediately, start playing with my hair, wondering if there is anything wrong with it. People keep looking at me weirdly. My hair seemed fine when I left the dorm. I scrape my tongue over my teeth, hoping not to find anything in there. Nope, not that either.

“I’m so sorry.” I hear someone say. But when I turn around to greet them, they’re already halfway down the hall.

That was weird. I scratch my head, wondering what it could be. I close my eyes and check my hard drive. Wondering if I was too shrewd with my memory sorting and forgot something important.

I check my month’s capacity. I still have a whopping 60% free. Wow. Practically unheard of with only a few days of March left. I’m a bit of a hoarder when it comes to memory keeping.

I only delete the absolutely non-essential items permanently. Stuff like going to the bathroom, and trips on the train. Stuff that in the long run doesn’t really matter; it’s just fillers between the important things.

I can remember a particularly rough Summer when I was sixteen. Sales were way down at the shop, and my family had to downgrade our memory plan substantially. It meant that I suddenly had to make some very tough decisions very rapidly before we changed to the new plan and memories were wiped at random to fit the lesser space. I’m talking about choosing between my first trip to Disney Land and baking cookies with grandma for the last time; those kinds of choices.

Ever since then, I’ve tried to keep everything. The second I started earning money of my own I always went for the premium plans that gave me plenty of buffer room. I wanted to be able to recall every second of every day in the month if I really wanted to and still have left over.

It was bloody expensive. But ever since that Summer, I have been uncompromising. I can live in a shitty dorm and miss out on drinks with friends from time to time. But I don’t want to lose a single megabit of memory space.

There are last-resort ways to retrieve memories of course. There are data storage clinics across the country. But it’s ridiculously expensive to do so. And they only keep them in storage for 30 days. In short, a bunch of my childhood memories are just gone. And I don’t even know what I’m missing.

Retrieving a memory is of course very tricky. In the case of, you know, not even knowing what you’ve forgotten. I know there were a few times when Dad was running really low on space. So, he’d delete a few things. Make a note of them and then wait until payday and go down to the clinic to get them back. It sucks but in the long run, it was cheaper doing that than upgrading to a better plan.

It's not recommended, but you can also get someone who shared a memory to upload their version to your hard drive. Like I chose to forget Disney land, but Mum kept hers, so she just gave me a copy once we upgraded our memory plan and had enough room again. Sure, it was weird watching my younger self through my Mum’s eyes, but it was better than having no memory of it at all.

You can also zip memory files. A zipped file takes up significantly less room. None of the files in the zip can be accessed until you unzip the whole thing. Basically, it means you can forget something for a while but still get it back. The issue is, forgetting that the zip is there. The way around that is setting a notification, to check the zip. So, you can sort it out later.

I don’t really like doing that if I’m being honest. Nine times out of ten, if you’re prepared to zip something, it means that you don’t need or want it. It just means that I’m being a hoarder again. It’s like bagging clothes ready to donate them, but just letting the bag sit there. Until you maybe open it again, let your conviction slip and take out a couple of items that you don’t really need or want but just feel the need to keep.

Of course, I still do it all the time. As I said, I’m a bit of a memory hoarder.

I roll my eyes as a notification pops up. Would you like to unzip the file ‘Jason’?

I sigh and remind myself not to be a hoarder. “Sorry, Jason.” I say, as I move the file to the delete folder, “you mustn’t be that important.”