The Shit My Brain Decides to Keep

Nathan has told me the name of this place about six times. Maybe seven.

It’s somewhere in Sabden where you can go and buy fresh, unpasteurised milk, and every time he mentions it I think, Oh yes. I absolutely want to go there.

And then my brain apparently throws the name directly into the deepest pit into the centre of the earth/brain! 

This morning I remembered the place again.

Not the name, obviously.

Just the existence of it.

I thought it might be a lovely thing to do with the girls. A little spontaneous home-ed adventure. We’d drive over to Sabden, find the farm, get some fresh milk. Perhaps learn something about where milk comes from along the way.

The girls were considerably less enchanted by this proposal.

Apparently going somewhere to buy milk does not constitute an adventure.

Fair enough.

Still unable to remember what the place was called, I sent Nathan another voice note.

What’s that milk place called again?

Followed by an apology because I’m fairly certain I’ve asked him this at least five times already.

Thankfully, Nathan has ADHD too, so there are certain things that don’t require much explanation between us.

He replied with the name.

Again.

And while I was sending him another voice note, apologising for the current state of my information-retaining abilities, I was standing in the kitchen making myself a Vietnamese coffee.

Black coffee.

Condensed milk.

Something I first discovered years ago while travelling around Southeast Asia and have loved ever since.

And halfway through talking I suddenly remembered something else.

Nathan travelled around Southeast Asia too.

He worked over there.

So I said something along the lines of, “Oh, you’ll know what I’m making.”

And that’s when something struck me.

I cannot remember the name of a place this man has told me five or six times.

But I can remember where he travelled years before I even knew him.

How does the brain decide what gets to stay?

People sometimes talk about memory as though the brain is a filing cabinet.

Perhaps mine is.

It’s just a filing cabinet with an absolutely appalling filing system.

Because somewhere in there, apparently worthy of permanent storage, are movie quotes, bits of films I watched decades ago and an alarming amount of dialogue from Friends.

Phoebe’s phalange?

Filed.

Princess Consuela Banana Hammock?

Filed.

Random sentence somebody said to me fifteen years ago?

Filed.

Name of the place I actively want to visit to buy milk?

Absolutely nowhere to be found.

It’s strange when you think about it.

Our brains don’t necessarily keep the things we decide are important. They seem to make their own decisions.

There are people in my life about whom I hold these tiny, seemingly insignificant pieces of information.

Places they’ve been.

Things they’ve done.

Stories they’ve told me.

Little fragments of lives that happened long before those lives ever crossed mine.

And somehow they stay.

Nathan and I travelled through some of the same parts of the world at completely different times, living entirely separate lives.

Years later, I’m standing in my kitchen in Lancashire, spooning condensed milk into coffee, and a tiny piece of his old life bumps into a tiny piece of mine.

I remember that.

Perfectly.

The name of the bloody milk place?

Gone again!