What are we if we are just our memories?

What are we if we don't have our memories? If our memories have no bearing on reality?

I was wrong when I said Josephine was gone for good. Josephine, ex-girlfriend from 10 years ago, having found me through one of my fotologs, then disappeared for several months, has reappeared with a new fotolog of her own and has started posting her own photos.

I thought I shut down any possibility of us meeting up again, but I oddly opened the possibility of her coming to one of my band's gigs. Her coming to a gig would mean something on the lines of meeting up again. Curious. How did that happen?

Who are you? What are you doing here?

It's alright. Anything that might let me connect with . . . something that might have seemed real before . . . .

If it were Amina, I don't know, just some strange immersion? I call her the love of my life but there's nothing there anymore. It's totally irrational now. If it's a past life thing, I think that she was a stranger I happened to pass upon and then subconciously internalized in some quasi-obsessive way, and then pursued in this life having run into her.

Losing her was only natural. It wasn't based on anything real. Nothing deep, nothing meaningful. It was all one-way. It wasn't reciprocated in the way something with meaning should. She never returned, so there was never a circle. Circles are all-important in nature.

If it were Shiho, . . . she did go deep in this lifetime. She had the advantage of years and music over Amina. I recently saw the movie Linda! Linda! Linda!, which has become one of my favorite films for more than one reason. The least of which was one of the minor characters plays a song on stage that when I heard, I immediately recognized but didn't know what it was.

I knew I knew it because I could hum along to the melody and knew what was coming next. A perusal of the end credits and a web search and then a limewire download revealed to me that I had the Unicorn song on a cassette tape in New Jersey in a box of Shiho-things when we used to send mix tapes to each other.

A night spent on YouTube looking up music related to songs Shiho Nakai put on mix tapes makes me realize how deep Shiho had gotten just using music. But using music to get through to me is more about me. The music still means something to me, but Shiho somewhere out there might have absolutely no feeling or relevant memory relating to me whatsoever.

More than half of what I looked up on YouTube, although maybe sourced in what Shiho introduced me to, was what I found on my own. Shiho does not get credit for that.

Shiho, out of sight, out of mind, is just a memory. Not real. Even with the music to haunt. Amina, out of sight, out of mind, is just a memory. Even with the pervasion into fabric. Josephine, in sight, in mind, is fucking scary, not something I can handle as something on the road in front of me.

As much as I loved Josephine, she was no Amina, she was no Shiho. That is totally fucked. I need to think about why.

What are we if we are just our memories?