Memory is a maze

Some people will tell you that the sense of smell is the key to memory, the chemical trigger that activates the wash of recollection in the brain. And they would have a point if memory was chemistry, was no more than the click and whirr of axon against dendrite in your mindmeat.

But no. Memory is geography. Memory is street and sign, house and garden. Memory is riding a bus past the place you used to live, looking out the window and feeling the past lick through you, unlocking the days and years and loves that were. And the bus moves on, taking you through a space that has changed, through spatial relationships that have moved and morphed and wheeled around the sun too many times, while the sticky threads of a life you'd all but forgotten tug on you as you pass out of sight.

Memory is the rut you walked in spacetime, the habit-trail you wore in the carpet of your life as you trod the same path to her doorstep every night, curdled knots of physics linked one after another and dropping from your lips while you rehearsed what to say, where to sit, how to move in the singularity around her. Memory is bent space, kinked space, folded relationships in every sense of the world (okay, yes, including sense of smell) - and yet, twist and turn as the world might, it only takes a flicker of that old gravity to reactivate the past, to pull it forth from inside you, spilling like familiar radiation from the buffers of your reactor's control room.

Time and space and memory and thought, all the same thing. You set your feet at the start of the old path, walk through streets you knew two or five or ten years ago, heading along a vector you knew better than your name not so long ago. If you could walk it exactly the right way, exactly the same way you walked it one of those lost nights ago, then time will peel away, roll back like tidal forces; if you could retrace your steps perfectly through space, then time would shiver and fold to the state it had been that night, and she would be there at the door with a smile and a touch and a head full of love, and the memory clock would be reset back to the starting point again.

But you always lose your balance, you always trip or stumble or simply put a foot down a millimetre in the wrong direction. And space always hiccups back to place, time always rushes back to fill up the cracks; the house has been remodelled, she lies with her head on the chest of another, and memory packs itself back into its fractal tunnels.

Maybe you should have paid more attention in geography class

Patrick O'Duffy