Forgetting to Remember/Remembering to Forget

By Ben Daggers

As Jonas was making his journey toward
The hospital’s neuropsychiatry ward
He came to a narrow and long corridor
With red and blue tiling that covered the floor.
With next to no effort young Jonas could glean
The number of red and blue tiles he had seen.
Poor Jonas’s brain wouldn’t let him relax,
It constantly filled up his gray cells with facts.
To make matters worse, his brain would endeavor
To hold on to every detail forever.
And this meant his mental wellbeing declined
— By filling his brain he was losing his mind.

He finally sat in the waiting room chair,
And noticed a girl with a thousand-yard stare.
The twenty-nine freckles that peppered her cheeks
Were the prettiest thing he had seen in some weeks.
But unlike poor Jonas who couldn’t forget,
This girl had a brain that instead wouldn’t let
Her hold on to figures, to facts or to faces,
To plans, or to pictures or people or places.
When Katie (for that was the pretty girl’s name)
Locked eyes onto Jonas, she couldn't refrain
From feeling an almost magnetic attraction,
And this spurred our young heroine into action.
“I realize I’m probably being too bold,
But your sweet, handsome face is a sight to behold.”
Her voice was then tinged with a deep sense of sorrow
She said: “I’m so sorry, but as of tomorrow,
You’ll cease to exist in my mind, for you see
My brain disregards every new memory.”
In unison both of them cried in despair:
“I wish that my memory problems weren’t there!”

The two of them left with a forecast quite bleak,
And returned for their checkups the following week.
He knew that she must’ve been out in the sun,
Since her twenty-nine freckles were now thirty-one.
But strangely he noticed he couldn’t recall,
The number of tiles he had spied in the hall.
Apparently things he had seen and heard lately,
Were being forgotten to make room for Katie.
Though his affliction appeared to be shrinking,
He was resistant to such wishful thinking.
“Besides” Jonas muttered, “It’s not worth a damn,
If the girl of my dreams can’t recall who I am.”
Yet to Jonas’s total and utter surprise,
The freckled young lady piped up and said “Hi.”
“I may be mistaken, forgive me if so,
But I have a hunch that you’re someone I know.”
Jonas, who’d now shed his earlier doubt,
Then plucked up the courage to ask Katie out.

The date night itself was an outright success,
Passing without an iota of stress.
They both loved the small-talk, the wine and the cake
(which Katie had ordered three times by mistake.)
The following weeks, although it sounds strange,
Saw a profound psychological change.
Jonas’s mind, which had once been so crowded,
Began to get ever-increasingly clouded.
He’d enter a shop then forget what to buy,
And could only name twenty-one digits of pi.
In place of these trifles, was Katie instead,
She occupied more and more space in his head.
While Jonas was losing his famed recollection
Katie was off in the other direction.
Her everyday struggles remained much the same,
But Jonas’s features were etched in her brain.
She could picture each lock of his golden-brown hair,
His manner of speaking, his sensitive air.

And as the months passed, the young couple became
Not merely closer, but also more sane.
Memory no longer posed such a riddle,
Now they’d effectively met in the middle.
Life had been hard for these troubled young lovers,
Until they encountered the cure-all: each other.

🩷🩷🩷

Ben Daggers is a short story writer who loves exploring the dark edges of fiction, then slowly backing away before things get a bit too dark. His words have been published in PRISM International, Sky Island Journal, Crepuscular and many other places.

When not writing, procrastinating, or feeling guilty for procrastinating instead of writing, Ben spends his time doting over an emotionally-needy Italian greyhound.