Remembering

Faces Frozen, Bread Baking.

I love the smell of freshly baked bread. When I was a little boy, my aunt would bring me to a bakery just like this to pick up a freshly baked loaf of bread. It was not the fancy gardenia or gourmet bakery bread that graces our table these days. It was just simple bread, with a slightly burnt shaved off crust, soft fluffy white centre, in a transparent plastic bag that was knotted at the top. Everything was so organic, even the packaging. Last Friday, on my way home from work, I detoured through the old estate. It was late and everything was closed, everything has changed. Memories overwhelmed me and I kept wondering what it meant to remember, when the present at that very moment was a reminder that I should forget. How ironic. Conventional wisdom holds that memory is like a serial recording device, something akin to a computer hard disk. In reality, memory is more dynamic, not static, like a paper on which new texts will be continuously recorded, thanks to the power of posterior information. Memory is more of a self-serving dynamic revision machine; you remember the last time you remembered the event and, without realizing it, change the story at every subsequent remembrance.

I remembered what you said, but maybe I only remembered it the way I wanted to.