Memory Mischief 🪄

My pills to make me remember are making me forget.

So...I forget when I need to remember.

I am twin silhouettes stitched into the fabric of a vanishing mind. One draws breath from the future, the other exhales the past.

Sadly...it leaves me somewhere between here and there

not as a metaphor, but happening in real time

did they mistakenly prescribe me...

“medicine made by mischievous ravens”.

Or pills which makes me pause mid-step, mid-thought or mid...geez, I already forgot

It may sound like a tale from the realm where memory gets muddled into alternate universes

Or maybe I was, with all good intentions - sent to...

🪶 The Forgetful Apothecary named Rindle

Who exists between fog and forgetfulness, and is famous for her “Remembrance Elixir” - a potion brewed from owl's breath, and one very slippery memory fish.

One day, a local poet (me) came to refill her bottle. Rindle gave the refill a shake, muttered something like “Don’t take too much or you’ll remember things that never even happened,” and sent me on my way.

I drank it. And suddenly:

I couldn't remember if I were coming or going,

I remembered starting out for the library and ending up at the supermarket, wondering why I expected to find books with different flavors.

Desperate for clarity, I ran back towards Rindle’s apothecary...found myself at the Barber shop and then remembered that I needed medicine not a haircut.

Which was all in vain...

For Rindle looked up and said, “Sorry, I have no memory of making memory potions".

Turns out she is sipping her own supply.

Seriously though...I find myself writing in a forgetful fog of poetry, living in - half sanctuary metaphors...known to sigh at midnight and rearrange the furniture whenever moods shifted.

One day, feeling too remembered and not enough forgotten, I went to Rindle (who sold memories like they were spices - "Basil for nostalgia, Paprika for déjà vu"). I asked for something subtle. Something to make me remember just enough.

Rindle, who had recently misplaced her memory...didn’t seem fussed, gave me a vial labeled:

“Memo-Muddle: May Enhance...Erase, or Replace. Use with wild abandon.”

I drank it. And promptly:

Forgot my own name...but vividly recalled the names of all seven clouds that watched me grow up.

I returned to Rindle, demanding answers.

Rindle blinked and said, “I have no memory of being an apothecary. Are you selling potions"?

The poet (me), now dizzy with imagined victories and cloudy apothecaries, went home and brewed her own potion called “Reality Soup.” It contained moth wings, remembering, and exactly one honest sigh.

She drank it...Then sneezed.

Suddenly, she remembered everything...except what she came into the room for.

The poet is slowly getting her memory back ( it still comes and goes) by kissing a mirror on Tuesdays and eating invisible remembering stew.

But sometimes...on rainy mornings...she gets hugs of clarity in letters from her younger self...somewhere between here and there.