A passing afternoon
With each passing day memories of the years gone by are fading away. It's like someone put the days and months and minutes and hours into a mass production factory creating perfect replicas of one another. These replicas serve a dual purpose though.
They tend to erase memories of the past as well. A past where beings could just be. Where one could take a flight or a train as easily as walking from one room to another room.The hustle bustle of the town markets have seized to exist. Markets are quieter than a cemetery. For in the cemetery you can still hear the cries of the lost ones.
A wind blows and in a normal situation, it would have taken her to a time one spent on a park bench on a Sunday afternoon. But now, sensing a smell, she pulls up their mask a little higher, a little tighter hastily in the worry to avoid inhaling something they shouldn't.
As the day moves forward in chasing the sun, the replicas get powered on. She knows this feeling very well. Afterall, it has been days and months of exposure to replicas that have made her forgetful about anything before the advent of replicas.
The replicas trigger in, she forgets about the thought of that park bench, gets up from her desk. She removes her mask and rigorously splashes cold glasses of water on her face. She had read somewhere that the effect of replicas reduces if you put ice cold water rapidly as soon as you realise the effects have started kicking in.
She didn't want to forget today. She wanted to remember. Remember all the good and bad things that led upto this very moment. Opening her phone to distract her mind, she got a notification on her Google photos app showing memories of 3 years ago, 4 years ago, 5 years ago and so on. O
One photo showed flowers in someone's balcony.
Trying hard to recollect, she couldn't remember who was the sender of that photo. Does that person live there anymore? Are their flowers still blooming? Who is this person who sent me a picture of their garden and why am I not close to them anymore? Myriad volume of questions fluttered her mind. Thanks to technology, you can quickly change context with just a single swipe.
The next photo was from a hill station. On it were two cups of tea against the backdrop of a hut. She quickly remembered the context and decided to delete it before it could transport her to the state of mind she was at when at that hill station.
On next swipe, there was a photo of a friend's letter. The letter had got lost somewhere so there was no hard evidence of its existence until this very moment. The friend isn't a friend anymore either. She was going to delete this one but she got alerted by her mom's call from downstairs. She put her phone away, letting the replicas kick in again, while enjoying her cup of tea.
………
If you are reading this, reply to this email so that I know my messages are not going into thin air like a piece of space debris.