Memory Practice 1


Do you have fragments of memory that you wanna record?
A hasn’t been recording anything. So many things have stirred his mind and left him. Facing
these vanishing stories with a stable mind was almost impossible for him. For A, tracing 
memories might have been an act of searching for himself. But perhaps it only led him to 
lose himself in the ambiguity of those memories.

It is the thing naturally nailed into the body. 

B believes the memory is like a nail. It innates itself somewhere inside her without a particular
form or structure. She speaks of the inherent limitation of being human, bound to the past,
unable to escape from it completely. If the memory is incomplete, it forms someone I wish to
be present in the world, not the person I truly am. 

Today, A makes an attempt to find himself in a place where no one exists. It’s impossible to
erase people entirely from there. His very existence means colliding with the thoughts of
others in life. Where do all those people come from? Why do they stay in his head? B sits in the
same café as yesterday, sipping a warm Americano. Still, she always meets a different version
of herself.  She is the same person; as each day passes, she witnesses a new self. 

'I had practised erasing the memories.' He thought that erasing the unnecessary memories was
the way of finding himself a little better. One day, they still lingered in his mind. No matter
how much he tried to laugh them off, they stayed cold and distant toward him. Today, B saw a
different version of someone she knew, and her memory of that person changed. It was always a
matter of perspective, and perspective always reshaped the image of others. A cannot live B’s
life, and B cannot live A’s life. However, A does not live A’s life, nor does B live hers.

Today, A looks again at the scattered fragments of the mirror inside himself. He still doesn’t 
know whether to embrace or leave them outside. He still doesn’t know if he is capable of holding
them or not. He doesn’t know if those fragments expect something from him. He decides to stop
associating with the countless branches of thought that the ambiguity brings to his life. Life
doesn’t always linger in its ideal form. For B, memory brings her the future, not the past. The
future passes through the past, and it exists as either the ideal form of the past, adding a
little hope, or a distorted self within the anxiety. 

‘How many things have I reminisced about you? And at the same time, I’ve witnessed things I could
never grasp. In the process of all those memories dissolving like bubbles, I came across someone I
had never seen or felt before.’

'I have been recording all this time, but those words could never be written.'