Don’t forget me, will you? Da said.
How could I? I said. How could anyone forget you?
Ah, but you will, though. It’ll happen, probably quicker than you could know.
Not happening, Old Boy.
Don’t be stupid, Young Man. Be anything else but stupid. And it’s stupid to think you won’t forget. And it will happen to you, as well. Probably sooner than you could imagine. We all get forgotten. Don’t forget that.
He was right. By the time I got to school, all this was forgotten.
I made it. To the university, to freshmen week, which I remember almost nothing of, to philosophy.
I made it.
I got a roommate who is also philosophy and who smokes so much dope my computer giggles for ten minutes every time I open it up. He tells me all about his background on the sugar beet farm and I tell him all about mine, the summer camps and the horses and the high school archery team and my six-foot-two girlfriend, and he says “wow” a lot, and “cool,” and all the other stuff, the bumpy, prickly, complicated stuff is just lost in the fabulosity of my storytelling.
“What’s that bracelet thingy, dude?” he asks, taking my wrist and reading the inscription in the copper.
“It was a gift from my grandfather.”
“Wow. Cool. That’s deep, man.”
“That was him all right. Wow, cool, and deep.”
“Is there a story attached?”
“Nope.”
See that?
Right again, Old Boy.
All is forgotten.