A moment ago, you weren't reading this sentence.

Now you are.

And a moment from now, you won't be.

This is going to make writing anything permanent rather difficult.

Although, to be fair, the sentence seems to be handling it better than you are.

It's still here.

You are the one who keeps moving.

Which is strange, because from where you're sitting, it probably feels like you're staying perfectly still.

Let's test that.

Try to remember the first sentence of Chapter One.

Don't go back.

That's cheating.

Do you remember it?

Maybe you remember the exact wording.

Maybe you remember only the idea.

Maybe you remember nothing except that there was, at some point, a first sentence.

That's interesting.

Because for a few seconds, those words were your entire present.

And now look at them.

Not literally.

I said don't go back.

I mean look at what they have become.

A memory.

Or less than a memory.

A suspicion that something happened.

turn the page →

Most of your life seems to suffer from this problem.

Things happen with extraordinary confidence.

Then they vanish.

Breakfast does this.

Conversations do this.

Tuesdays are especially guilty.

Whole years have done it.

You probably lived through thousands of mornings that were once completely real and urgent and full of details.

Where are they now?

Don't worry.

This isn't a test.

If it were, we'd both fail.

Memory is a terrible archivist.

It keeps a receipt from a café you visited twelve years ago and loses an entire afternoon from last Tuesday.

It remembers the embarrassing thing you said at fifteen with suspicious clarity.

But ask it what you had for lunch three days ago and suddenly nobody is available for comment.

And yet you call this collection of missing files my past.

That's generous.

Most of your past is not something you remember.

It's something you assume happened because here you are.

You have evidence.

A body that is older than it was.

People who know you.

Messages.

Photographs.

Scars.

Passwords you really should have changed by now.

But the actual experience?

The living version?

Gone.

Which sounds sad until you notice that this is also what makes the next moment possible.

turn the page →

Imagine if nothing ever became the past.

Every sound stayed.

Every thought stayed.

Every itch.

Every notification.

Every sentence in this book remained equally present forever.

You would never reach this sentence because the first one would still be happening.

Actually, that's worse than it sounds.

You would still be reading:

You are now reading the first paragraph of this book.

For eternity.

I'm sorry I even suggested it.

So perhaps forgetting is not a defect.

Perhaps disappearance is part of how experience moves.

Something arrives.

You notice some of it.

You miss most of it.

Then it leaves.

And from whatever remains, you construct a story about what happened.

That's what memory seems to be surprisingly good at.

Not storing life.

Editing it.

Which means your past may be less like an archive and more like a book.

Selected scenes.

Missing chapters.

A few lines quoted far too often.

Some characters who receive more pages than they deserve.

And probably an unreliable narrator.

No offense.

I'm one too.

turn the page →

Here's another problem.

Every time you remember something, you're remembering it now.

The memory may point backward.

But the remembering happens here.

Right now.

Think of a room you lived in years ago.

Don't try too hard.

Just let one appear.

Maybe there is a window.

A bed.

A door.

Maybe the colors are wrong.

Maybe the furniture is from two different years.

Memory doesn't seem particularly bothered by building regulations.

But notice where that room is appearing.

Not in the past.

Here.

The past has somehow become a present image of something absent.

That's quite a trick.

You can sit in one room and briefly contain another.

You can hear the voice of someone who isn't speaking.

You can feel embarrassed by an event that no longer exists.

Your face can warm up over something that happened twenty years ago.

The body is very cooperative with ghosts.

And yet the moment you stop remembering, where did the old room go?

Back into storage?

Into your brain?

Into nowhere?

I don't know.

I'm a book.

My storage system is mostly shelves.

turn the page →

You may have noticed something else.

I told you not to go back.

Some of you obeyed.

Some of you absolutely did not.

And the funny thing is that going back doesn't actually take you back.

You can scroll upward.

You can reread the first page.

You can find the exact first sentence.

But you cannot become the person who encountered it for the first time.

That version of you had one advantage you can never recover.

They didn't know what came next.

You do.

At least approximately.

This is why rereading is so strange.

The book is the same object.

The words are in the same order.

But the reader has become a sequel.

You bring knowledge from later pages into earlier ones.

A sentence that once looked innocent can become a warning.

A joke can become sad.

A detail can suddenly look obvious.

The past itself may be fixed.

Your relationship with it is not.

Perhaps that's why people keep returning to old places, old photographs, old songs.

Not to recover the past exactly.

But to see what the present does to it.

turn the page →

There is something slightly unfair about all this.

You don't get to choose what becomes important while it's happening.

A completely ordinary afternoon can later become precious.

A person can say something forgettable that years later becomes the sentence you remember most clearly.

A boring walk can become the last walk.

A photograph can become valuable because of someone standing at its edge.

But in the moment, it was just Tuesday.

Nothing announced itself.

No music played.

No chapter title appeared above the day.

You weren't told:

Pay attention. You'll miss this later.

Maybe that's why people sometimes wish they had been more present.

Not because presence would have stopped the moment from leaving.

It wouldn't.

But perhaps they imagine they could have held a little more of it while it was here.

Of course, even that becomes another story.

The person remembering is always wiser than the person who had to live through it without knowing the ending.

That's an easy advantage.

History is full of experts who arrived after the event.

Including you.

Including me, apparently.

Although I wasn't there for any of your past.

I only have you as a witness.

And we've already established that your filing system is questionable.

turn the page →

So where does that leave us?

A moment ago, you weren't reading this page.

Now most of this chapter is already behind you.

Some of it may have become memory.

Some of it has probably vanished completely.

That's all right.

I don't remember every sentence either.

I mean, technically they're all written down.

That's cheating too.

But there is one thing I want you to notice before this chapter becomes part of your past.

You never actually visited the past while reading it.

You thought about it.

You pictured it.

You may have felt something because of it.

But every one of those things happened here.

The past kept arriving as a present thought.

Which raises an irritating question.

If the past only appears now...

what about the future?

You haven't reached Chapter Three.

It isn't behind you.

You cannot remember it.

But I just made you think about it.

So, in some small way, something that hasn't happened yet has already appeared.

That's inconvenient.

We'll deal with it next.

Not now.

Obviously.

It hasn't happened yet.