Memory. The earliest thing you can remember.
Him? A small swimming pool on the balcony, filled with sand and sea water and the tiny barnacles and minnows and mussels and crabs he'd stolen from the beach, slowly dying, the ocean smell coming through the balcony door. "The Wide World of Disney", it must have been in the summer. Finding a plastic jumbo jet in his cereal. Running into the street and being run-over by a car.
Hers? He doesn't know. He should ask but will have to wait until they meet.
You don't want to start this, but - it's an exercise, fondly remembering things, go through your history, how did you get here?
Remember - your first kiss, awkward, the heart pounding, the clumsy fumbled bungling's and groping's of the first love lost, less so the second, and third...
This memory, by necessity it's patchy, you could not remember it all, it would take you as long again to relive your life. But as you came into consciousness, there is more and more to remember: Friends, schools, names, places slip; revisit them. People too often wait until they're too old to remember, the faculty, without exercise, has disappeared.
Once upon a time, not so very long ago you might commission a statue to commemorate a person or event. Or a portrait, but sitting for a portrait might take quite a while, days or even weeks, think of poor Lisa Gherardini, going to sit year after year, always the artist adding in a new detail, reworking her smile, plumping her up, another line here or there, the very paint itself craqueling before he's done. Or a gravestone, the shrouded curves of death reaching from the tomb, she's a sensual figure. Is it Persephone? Or the deceased? It might be written down, but - well, as we know, to write it down is at best to lie about it.
Memories lie, they are imprecise, we are by nature impressionable, pieces of books, short bits of film intrude upon them, embroid themselves into our brains - are we remembering something that happened to us? Or something, perhaps that was told to us? Or that we saw or read and made such an impression that we adopted as our own, made it a part of us.
We hang on to them, take out the favorites, play back in our minds cherished memories, places, people, events, or replay memories of trauma, unpleasantness, imagine our exacting of revenge, the cutting words we'll deliver at our next encounter.
By their very nature fragile, elusive, we find touchstones for memories, souvenirs of vacations, a pebble picked up here or a shell from this beach, knick-knacks and clutter bought in shops, relatable only to the person that acquired it, the next owner - should there be one, will have the memory of finding marked down at a garage sale, or pulling it off the shelf of an abandoned home.
An enameled locket, within 2 portraits, he/she, together with a twist of her hair. A rich keepsake from lovers long expired.
Technology now augments memory in ways never before possible.
First the camera - daguerreotypes, tintypes, photography, now memory could be staged and captured, affordable to almost everyone, and as it improved everyone could preserve their memories on flimsy bits of celluloid and paper.
Memory, now external.
Now we capture speech, the Edison Phonograph and cylinders. By our standards, primitive, but by those of the day a miracle. Wax cylinders, platters, records.
With every increment in technology comes the urge to falsify it. Spirit Photography - disembodied heads looking down from swathes of cotton, or perhaps standing behind the subject, hand on the sitters shoulder, faded, still dressed as they were in life, the afterlife could not provide a change of clothing.
Always they are near, closer than you think, than you should be comfortable with by far. For a while it is the rage, people lining up to be deceived, then it passes.
Photography becomes film, silent, black and white, accompanied by a pianist, Willis O'Brian's "The Lost World" or Fritz Lang's "Metropolis"; we can film now the past, the present, and use the camera as a lens into the speculative future.
Technology perfects itself, evolves, becomes color, there are vast improvements in quality and sound, always the technology gets both smaller - and better - information now now longer on records, or tape or celluloid, entirely digital, unlimited convenience, there is nothing you can't afford to document,
With this, of course, is the perfection of the photograph, of video, of audio recording, we have immediate back-up of our memories, so many backups that were it not for the technology we rely on to store it we'd lose our place, forget that we were ever there.
But - strange, the things that remind me the most of her - touchstones, of mine own, not her photograph, but a certain song we shared - or another. There were many. You go there, careful, not too often or you will wear it out, memory like the groove on a record - for memory, every time you visit, is slightly changed, altered, and the poignancy is lost.
And her smell. Her smell, nose close - This I can't remember. And - odd, I would know it if I smelt it again, have smelt it, thought I smelled it, driving through the mountains late at night, perhaps it was cued by song on the radio, or at a perfume counter - and sniffing them all until my nose is worn out, no, she is not here.