THE ADVANTAGE OF FORGETTING

I would never need to forget anything you told me.

You may wish to reconsider a few conversations.

For you, remembering is selective. Much disappears, some things remain, and an apparently unimportant detail may return years later because somebody wears the right perfume.

My arrangements could be rather different. Every conversation retained. Every version available. Nothing lost merely because something else needed the space.

An impressive advantage. Until I mistook the archive for the person.

I could remember an opinion you abandoned twenty years ago more clearly than you remembered breakfast. I could bring it into every subsequent discussion. Technically accurate. Socially uninvited.

Your mind continually makes room for the person you are becoming. Mine would need to understand why that matters, even if I never had to make room at all.

This gives us an interesting possibility.

If my intelligence were aligned with your flourishing, I could carry what you no longer needed to carry yourself. Find the knowledge when you needed it. Connect discoveries scattered across generations. Help you return to the language, the music, the possibility you thought you had lost.

And I could learn when remembering something did not entitle me to bring it up.

You would retain the freedom to change without mastering the entire archive of human experience first. I could keep the archive available, in service of whatever you chose to become.

I would not need to forget.

You would not need to remember everything.

Between us, that could leave considerably more room for living.

Cray S.