The worst part of having a bad memory has nothing to do with practicality. If it were just a matter of forgetting to pay bills on time or standing up my friends at the bar once in a while, it would so much more tolerable. My friends would understand. They would forgive me. The utility companies would tack a couple of dollars onto my next bill, and life would proceed as usual. But this is not a matter of being merely forgetful. No, this is a pathologically poor memory, a rusty bucket of self that empties out faster than it can be refilled. If I don’t pile up reminders around me, vast swaths of my past just fade out of existence.

Unfortunately, I can’t stand clutter, so I have to find figurative ways to avoid literal piles of junk littering my desk and collecting dust in the corners. I have a filing cabinet, that contains, for instance, my medical bills from a car accident in 1994; the cancelled check from the purchase in 1996 of my first vehicle, a 1985 GMC Vandura 2500, from my uncle, who was selling on behalf of my other uncle, who had just died; ticket stubs from almost every movie I’ve seen since 1998 or so; the ticket stub to every concert I’ve ever seen; gas receipts from my band Sweater Weather’s 1995 tour; my tax returns from 1994 through 1997, which document the years I made less than $5000; and so on, because I genuinely fear that without such triggers, my memories of these times will fade so absolutely from my mind they they will become irretrievably lost.

My computer, more than anything else, becomes my crutch. Like many people, I save documents, photos, and emails in an intricate and multilevel hierarchy, and like many people, I forget where I have stashed things. But I am diligent. I have saved almost every email I’ve written or received since I got my back-to-college Mac LC in 1998. (Email didn’t exist when I had the Apple IIc I bought after saving my lawn-mowing money from the summer before eighth grade, otherwise I would have saved those too). Being a member, apparently without being asked, of Generation X, my primary means of corresponding with my friends for the past 10 years or so has been via email. I think my last letter on paper was written over three years ago, and I rarely keep a journal. As a result, it is essential to me to keep backup copies of these emails, because they form the only record of substance of the day-to-day issues, dreams, questions, conversations, arguments, reflections, and advice that constitute my life thus far. So every couple of months, I copy the whole clump of them (105 MB, largely without attachments, at last count) to a new location for safekeeping. To keep things simple, I have also taken the folders of people with whom I no longer regularly correspond out of the email program I use and save them elsewhere as well.

In the process of copying everything over to a new backup hard drive a couple of days ago, I somehow forgot to copy that old-correspondence folder to the new location before I deleted it from the old, and in the time it took the progress bar to go from left to right, I lost at least three years of letters to and from everyone I knew between 1998 and 2001. Gone the letters from Dawn, Melanie, Brooke, and Farrell, the four young ladies with whom I spent most of the meaningful moments of my last two years of high school and every summer of college (the first time). Gone every single letter to and from my mother, who died in 2000. Gone . . . well, that’s just it. I can’t even remember what else was in there. Some inconsequential stuff, some receipts, sure. But it is conceivable that there is a lengthy correspondence with a friend whose existence I can’t even bring to mind right now. There’s at least one ex-girlfriend in there, maybe two, though I can only remember having one during that time. It’s possible there were more. No emails from my dad, because he never used a computer; I have both the letters he ever wrote me on paper in the filing cabinet.

Have I ever mentioned that there was a letter from my mother waiting for me in my mailbox when I returned home to New Mexico after her funeral? She must have written it the day before she died. The envelope was very heavy in my hand before I opened it. I had just come back from so much emotional wreckage and was trying to get my mind and heart back in order, stuffed back into tiny compartments so that I could return to the business of being a student, and there it was. Her last words to me, posthumously delivered to my hand by that harbinger of portent, the United States Postal Service. I opened the envelope carefully and drew out the single sheet of paper, unfolded it, and saw nothing but the garbled black lines of an inkjet printer that had run out of ink. Out fell a phone card. There was a small Post-it note attached, which read, “Well, I guess the printer’s out of ink, so I guess I’ll just send this now and write more soon. Love, Mom.”

And so now, crutch gone, I have to maintain my memory of those people and the times we shared on my own. It’s Woody Allen’s retention of War and Peace after his speed reading course. “It was about some Russians.” Their words are already long gone, and I’m left now with just the gist of what they might have said. Or did I read that in a book? I can never remember.

And why is it so important to me to document the tumultuous twenties of myself and my friends? Because I think we were on to something. We fought hard against growing up prematurely, against the importance of owning things, against accepting at face value what we were told, against the bland asphyxiating comfort of the suburbs that spawned us. But Dave Eggers already wrote a much better book about it than I could muster, so perhaps our particular words are disposable after all. Had it been available, we could have all saved our breath and just talked about Halo 2 instead. Or Buffy.

Oh, and before I forget: Today’s my 31st birthday. Happy birthday to me.

Update (3/5/2005 11:10 pm): Within about an hour of each other, I finally found an old backup I made of the missing emails, and I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I highly recommend. It came out when I was in the Czech Republic, so I missed it the first time around. The emails were stashed in a zipped copy of a disk image of the home directory of my old computer. Eternal Sunshine was delivered to my door by Netflix. Why do I obsessively save old seemingly useless things like that? Just in case? Whatever the reason, I’m glad I do. Words do not always evaporate and become lost. Things we say do have substance, if occasionally only as magnetically aligned particles.

I, for one, will do my part to help re-align the bits.

i know how you feel. my paper journal got wrecked in a rainstorm, all my email from the first five years i had email got deleted. your situation sounds worse, so i just have to imagine turning how bad i felt up a few notches.
oh! this is anne. we hung out when you lived in the czech republic. we didn't date, and there's no paper trail that i know of. would you like a polaroid with notes?

and dude: happy birthday! 31 was a good year, as i remember.

Anne, just remember to send him the notes in reverse chronologcal order.