Letters to the Void, #5

Central region of the Carina nebula


Dear Void,

Where do our memories go?

Something tells me, dear Void, that you have an answer...

I can remember so many, many things. From trivial math to the sensation of jumping into a river. From the sound of my baby crying to the sight of corpses lined up in rows. From the smell of burning plastic to the typical rum sound my car makes such that when it makes any other sound except its typical sound I am immediately alert and questioning just what the hell could be wrong with my car now.



But where do they all end up?

In the brain, somewhere to do with the hippocampus, I suppose, and interconnected with all the other parts of the brain and spinal cord and nerves and nerve cells spanning throughout the body. For there is more than one type of memory, perhaps even gradients between working-memory and muscle-memory and long-term-memory and the vast majority of memories which we forget.

That's where you come in, dear Void... have you heard your cue? Enter stage right.

Forgetfulness. Oblivion. Absence of mind or thought or memory or self.

(Those things are also interconnected with memory: the mind, or consciousness, and the sense that we are ourselves, and the sense that we exist in a time and a place, even every thought through our heads—it all pulls from and adds back to the stockpile of our memories.)

We, too, are part of the Void—here, on our little blue planet no one else anywhere else has probably even noticed. Everyone on Earth lives in the middle of nowhere!

In death, our experiences of you, dear Void, our memories, our gathered knowledge and learned crafts, our best moments and our worst moments, they all go back to you. Our love, our fears, our regrets and cherished moments. All of the everyday things, too—coffee at sunrise, a kiss under a half moon, a fart in bed on a Saturday—they go back to you.

Thank you for granting them to us, dear Void.

And with that, I'll leave you blog-readers with this and wish you happy memories! :D