An elephant never...what is it again?

If there was a superhero whose superpower was memory, it would be me. And I would wear a very flattering black unitard and high-heeled black boots. And a very subtle "M" would be embroidered on my cape. Which would also be black.

I was updating my poetry page, and I was startled by how immediate and detailed my memories were of where I was and what I was feeling at the time I wrote each line. I could literally feel myself sitting in my bedroom -- upstairs at my parents' house when I was renting it from them -- thinking about the moon and the solitude of the night. I remembered jotting off hasty rhymes from my pale grey office. I remembered every iota. To the point where I could experience it all again. Even the struggle for the rhymes and the meter and the meaning. I remember more than most people. But I don't do so very much with the memories. Do I learn from them? Do they add to me in some way? Sometimes, they are like the old college textbooks you hang onto because they are thick and heavy and they were expensive and you never bothered to try and sell them back. They sit on your bookshelf, gathering dust, causing the particle board to sag in an unsightly manner. And you never look at them. You never open them to find the little scraps of paper you accidentally left between the pages. You never refer back to the sections you highlighted and were very careful to detail with your notes and thoughts and impressions. They are archival copies of things that once mattered. But they don't get much use, and they take up a lot of space.

I remember once promising myself I wouldn't get so carried away with metaphor.