I will remember everything about you whether you and I like it or not

Sometimes I don't like this either.

We’re gonna have to wing this because I thought I had something to say but I guess it wasn’t important because I forgot what it was. This happens to me a lot, the mental equivalent of walking into another room and forgetting why I went in there. Maybe I’ll wander back out and then remember, but more often than not I’ll let it go.

Live image of a thought trying to make its way over to the front of my brain

I’m unsure if this is an age thing or if it’s something that’s been happening to me as I fall more and more into a routine and I no longer end up in situations that force my mind to do some quick thinking to get myself into or out of predicaments. The price of comfort.

So my short term memory is pretty shot, but I will say that I have an amazing memory for things that nobody else would care to remember. Like, picture perfect images of a very specific moment, usually with or about someone else who definitely does not remember this and I have to pretend I don’t either, lest I come across as super creepy.

Like one time I ended up on this job with this director I worked with years prior, and it was clear he didn’t remember me, but he mentioned that I looked and sounded familiar. An offhand comment, where I even padded it with a, “I know this is weird I remember this, but the last time we worked together you were mostly away because you busted your back or something,” and the look on his face… Like I already knew it was weird, as I prefaced that entire statement acknowledging it (and regretted saying anything the second I started), but he found that almost too much, when what I left out was that I remembered the days he did show up, how he was an absolute asshole and threw our entire progress of that job out, weeks of animation, in a fit of rage (a buy one get one free deal advertisement to be played during a basketball game starring a cartoon frog. It was the week before Thanksgiving, and he told us all to spend our time trying to figure out what kind of a dance a dancing frog would do. I also recall way too much information about his bad back and that he didn’t even do anything, just woke up wrong on a rainy day, and how he was on a shit ton of drugs when he did manage to make it into the office, and that I thought he was in a bad mood all of the time because of the pain but, no, he’s just an asshole (as that third job would confirm, because that was actually our third time working together. And he still didn’t remember me.).

Proof that the above statement is true due to the fact I have a bunch of dancing frog sketches (none of mine were chosen; that project sucked for a multitude of reasons).

And that was me holding back and pretending to be digging deep into my mind vault. Which is what I do all the time, if I don’t straight up match the other person’s energy and act like I don’t know or remember anything about them. Because I’ve learned the hard way that remembering tiny details about someone who does not remember you and revealing it to them sets you up to being a weirdo.

I’d be insulted at the amount of people who don’t remember me if I didn’t recognize that I am the abnormal one, especially when I (re)meet other freelancers on the job. Like my friend’s ex when she showed up on a project during my last days, and it was like those scenes in early season 30 Rock with Liz meeting Jack’s girlfriend/fiancee, the one with the bird bones.

“Hello, you probably don’t remember me, I’m Phoebe… Sorry I don’t shake hands. I have Avian Bone Syndrome.”

She never looked me in the eyes and probably didn’t add a name to my face, but oh, I knew her and her limpid dead fish of a handshake. That alone will never leave the recesses of my mind- how was her hand both cold and sweaty, a flaccid appendage that normally cannot be replicated when bones and cartilage are involved, held out in a way, palms down, elbow at 90 degrees, that defies normal procedure. As if she was expecting me to bend down and brush my lips against her knuckles. That handshake alone had me judging my friend and his choice of women for a while (also, I don’t normally shake hands when I meet someone like that, she completely initiated it on her own).

Anyway, I’ve learned to be the one to glance over and be like, ‘Hmm, have we worked together before? Do we know each other?’ While my brain instantly clocks them, ‘Ah, yes, we both worked at this other studio in fall of 2019 on different projects, but we got lunch together with a group of people- we all got sandwiches from the Italian place and then we sat on the roof of the building and the sky was really blue that day.’ And then we’d make eye contact and then we’d be both be like, “Hey! We know each other!” And then I’d watch them try to remember how while I pretended I’m doing the same.¹

I wonder what it means that my brain likes to constantly live in the past, and only the past. Probably a lot, as I definitely am unable to think about the future (questions like, ‘where do you see yourself five years from now?’ brings up an existential dread because I don’t know. And I don’t want to think about it. I can’t even live in the present! There’s so many things I need to handle right now that I don’t want to (three words: marketplace health insurance. Also, what’s for dinner? I don’t know! I didn’t even have lunch yet! My breakfast was a single Milano cookie!).

So I will continue to live in the past, where things are known and unchangeable and fact.² And I can lord over the people who don’t remember these small things that aren’t actually worth remembering while resetting the password to my work email. Again. For the third time this week.

1. What’s really weird though is that I’m not particularly good at names or faces or even recognizing people who I should be able to because I see them all the time- like neighbors, doormen when they’re not behind a desk, white male celebrities, and my sister in law’s mother. Coworkers who I’ve worked with for a week though, apparently enter my memory vault for eternity.

2. And only reference shows from fifteen to twenty years ago.