When the Past is Gone Forever

"What if the whole of my memory is stored solely in the material world, my mind nothing more than a reflection of events locked in the most incidental of things? How many more memories remain hidden?"

-Kim Ross

"Epilogue," Dresden Codak by Aaron Diaz

My parents' self-storage unit was robbed a few days ago and, as far as they can tell, everything that was taken was mine. Comics, books, movies, toys and various other mementos of whatever I did in the past 26 years... I don't have them anymore. They're somebody else's now, stripped of all meaning except monetary value.

I'm not even sure what I've lost; it's all a hundred miles away. Weeks will fade into a month or more before I can go back home to see. In the meantime, disordered scraps of memory flit about, always just out of my reach.

How many things will I never remember again?

• My first Superman action figure, S-shield faded and barely recognizable. Cloth cape frayed. Joints too loose to stand.
• The individual issues of Kingdom Come and Astro City that Nate gave me before he vanished into whatever new life awaited him.
• Joust on the original Nintendo. Space-ostrich warfare on a scorched alien landscape. I cannot explain why I loved that game so much, but it's probably where I first learned to lose without losing enjoyment.
  
• The Star Wars figures I used to make cheesy, stop-motion lightsaber battles.
  
• The tin with two decks of Jack Daniel's playing cards. They were Papa's. He taught me to play blackjack. There was another deck that was always in his truck--Pall Mall playing cards. Liquor and cigarettes. It's funny; he never used either (the substances, not the cards) while I knew him. But that wasn't so long, really...
• My notebooks from Japan. Calligraphy collected from temples a world away. Are they gone, too? I'm almost to ask.

I can't access it all. Probably never will again without the objects there to trigger remembering. Hundreds of bits of my life--maybe thousands, counting all the comics--cut adrift into the vastness of the world.

...

Yes, it's all a bit melodramatic.

I'm mostly fine with it by this point. I have to be. What's there to be done?
How could I possibly mourn for losses I'm not even sure of, or for gaps I can't remember?

I just hope whoever I used to be will forgive my forgetting.
And I'll do my best to forgive whoever I become for forgetting me.