Interlude
From the moment a child is born, they begin to forget.
Life is a series of memories formed and lost, experiences repressed and replaced.
Parents catalog first words and first steps, bronzing childhoods to keep in stasis.
Friends remember jokes that last longer than the friendships.
Trauma enters the bloodstream and pumps beneath the skin, creating muscle memory from a moment the conscious mind has long forgotten.
Even when reduced to ash, the embers of memory still burn bright. A scent can unfurl a forgotten dream. A slant of sunlight can spark a repeated conversation. The sound of laughter can draw out a riddle without a punch line.
Perhaps that is all déjà vu is in the end: a spark of memory, adding color to the portrait of the world.
A kind of natural magic that begs the practitioner to think, to feel, to be—again and again and again.
We exist in a world that demands too much of some and too little of others, but in this we are all made equal.
We live to forget. We forget to live. We capture special moments in our palms and cling to them until they slip through our fingers, a daily sensation so normalized that we don’t even notice the loss.
But without those ephemeral experiences that make up the fabric of a soul, who do we become?