And the things you can't remember tell the things you can't forget

A new method of profiling high school students in the United States, first proposed by the American Psychological Association through the Pinkerton Agency's WAVE America campaign.

Officially known as "ATTYCRT³YCF" (or "Attorney Critic F"), this program would profile high school students in several fashions:

Visual Recollection collection

Each WAVE America poster would be distinctively designed, and contain several subliminal messages. Each poster would have a slightly different phone number. The subliminal messages (things you can't remember) would dictate which number you would remember (things you can't forget), which would reveal information about one's id to the psychologists monitoring the experiment.

Standardized Test manipulation

Each classroom environment will contain subtle nonsense phrases partially obscured by subtle emotional triggers. For example, the phrase "fartwaddle zamzed trajnwal" might be concealed in the image of a mugging. Mugging victims will shy away from these images (things they can't forget, but want to), and hence never learn the nonsense words (things they can't forget) which will aid the psychologists in their quest.

This proposal was eventually discarded by the Pinkertons, not for privacy or educational sanctity concerns, but for the price tag - it was proposed that every student be assigned their own, personal psychologist.

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Node challenge by ZamZ

Less linear, out of order, come unstuck these deadweight memories. What I want is that loose tooth twisting, dangling in reach of my straining tongue; the space between those arbitrary marks on an arbitrary line. Only under the canopy and its lights, lights in the boughs that shudder with the wind, eye-burning lights, do I feel a remembrance. What? Déjà vu? Or moreso, when she climbed the branches like a girl of twelve, like skirts were made for ripping, hair for knotting. And she called to me, hidden by light. I was sure she would fall. She laughed, anti-climactic, and swung round the trunk with deft bare feet and nimble bark-fingers until softly on the grass again.

I am never sure of things now.

There were her roses, peach colored, gathered by the windowsill. She watered and watered, like a mother glutted with generosity. She cooed over them, let her fingers trace their delicate curves. Her precious, her lovely; petals and beaded water. Dew between grass blades, my hand beneath green. Those flowers aren't for showing I told her. The arcs of the sun grow treacherous. You do not understand changes of season, you do not know the ways of the years. How could she in her perpetual summer?

Winter came not as dry petals brittle to touch. Winter came as a vase, shattering.

Her protector I thought. To guide her in times of trouble. But I did not see myself chasing her shadows. I picked up her trail through a hunting ground become ungentle with the passage of time. But not a passing, a series, out of sequence. She knew my moods, my fugues. She took her time as I muttered of haste. Erratic I thought. The paths that she tread. But my own shuddering eyes branched them into a thousand nowheres. My steady step was a shellshocked fumbling. She danced ever constant, evergrace. As if she didn't know where her footfalls led. As if it was not her choice from the very start. Her mentor I thought.

A blind man praising his own foresight. A cat chasing his own tail.

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When the lights in the trees depart and take their places in the heavens, I will not lift my head from the grass. I will not move until I can capture those infinite moments; the shape of her face as she smiled, her sing-song voice, her gestures of confidence, the wisdoms she whispered to an indifferent ear. I scoop them up like liquid to parch this desperate thirst. They dribble through my fingers. I must hold tighter. There is a river before me and a pile of rocks behind me. Stone yields no water. The weight of regret sits dead and disordered.

Your voice in the slow rush of the stream. Help me. I cannot swallow this worthless rubble of anger and self-pity. I cannot wait eons for the river to wash these sins away. I know you are there among the currents and eddies, flowing freely, waiting for me.

I thought that which you do not remember is that which did not exist. I did not know the silence has a voice of its own.

I thought that which you do not remember is that which did not exist.

I did not know the silence has a voice of its own.

My naivety; your indifference. Memories lurking in dark recesses, battering against slippery glass walls. Guileless, my face, but my eyes betray the exhaustion of a five year war. Suppression? I think of it not; my subconscious workings continue unaided. But for how much longer?

A dark Odysseus, so were you to me. Your glib words, your constant leading me down dark paths, not even allowing breadcrumbs to fall from hopeful fingers. Even then, as now, I read your mind; still, you haunt me, although you are many miles away.

No matter how fast I bury you, your hand continues to break through the surface, grime covered and clutching at me. I do not have the heart to step back, nor the strength to let the spade fall with a hard finality. My arms grow tired from this constant shovelling. One day, I must stop.

Your laughter dismissed the words that flew from my mouth. No matter how many times I extended my hand to lead you from the shadow, you took it and led me deeper. At times my touch almost seemed to cause you phyical pain, but you endured it for reasons I could not, cannot, understand. Was it your patronising gift to me, or another motivation entirely?

I gazed into your eyes from under an ocean of your presence.

I drowned quietly and without complaint.

Observing from afar: your eyes following the light movements I made. My hand tracing the surface of the water, sending ripples downstream. No matter how many reverberations I left, they were swallowed in the disturbance of your thrown rocks. If you cannot step into the same stream twice, you were raging torrents, sweeping my youth away. Your river swallowed my trickling, silken stream.

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My gaze dulled with time, like that of a caged panther. Could you not see I needed my ropes cut, my wings left unclipped, my enclosure torn down? I paced tirelessly as you silently watched, holding all the keys but moving nothing.

For my Debussy, you returned Rachmaninov; you leading me deeper, into a world of lapidary harmonies, resonating from the ground below my feet. Then, I was afraid of their power. Now I recognise that there are jewels undiscovered in the darkness, a beauty in the granite of your eyes. Were you asking me, even then, to shape grace from those hard chunks, hewn from your mysterious depths?

I did not realise in my innocence that the natural order of the world partners day with night.

I will meet you again in the transitions of dawn and dusk.

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"And the things you can't remember tell the things you can't forget that history puts a saint in every dream."
(From: "Time" by Tom Waits, Rain Dogs album) - thank you!

For izubachi, and for the third party.