My Name Is Memory Read Online Free PDF

when it came to the same thing? The heavy moisture in the air made his face feel wet. Another car passed.
    Of all the millions of possible things he could take with him, he had a piece of Lucy’s soft purple dress balled up in his hand and the sour taste of bourbon in the back of his throat. In his mind he held the look of fear on her face as she tried to get away from him and he wouldn’t let go, ruining centuries of carefully nurtured hope, knowing he was ruining it, and still not being able to stop himself from ruining it.
    That was enough to make him hold his balance and jump.

My Name Is Memory

NORTH AFRICA, 541
    I
    was once a perfectly normal person, but it didn’t last long. That was in my first life. The world was new to me then, and I was new to myself. It began in roughly the year 520 A.D., but I am not sure of the exact point in time. I didn’t keep track of things in the same way then. It was long ago, and I didn’t know I’d be remembering them.
    I consider it my first life because I don’t remember anything coming before it. I guess it’s possible that I lived lives before that. Who knows, maybe I’ve been around since before the time of Christ but something happened to me in this particular life that led to the formation of my strange memory. Doubtful but possible, I guess.
    And the truth is, some of the very early lives are murky. There were one or two when I think I must have died young from ordinary childhood diseases, and I’m not sure how they fit into the larger order of events. I keep a few bits and pieces from them, the expansive hotness of fever, a familiar hand or voice, but my soul was hardly situated before I moved along.
    It’s painful for me to think about that first life and to try to recount it to you. I would have done better to die early of measles or pox.
    Since I first began to understand my memory, I’ve considered my actions differently. I know that suffering doesn’t end with death. That’s true for all of us, whether we remember or not. I didn’t know it then. Maybe it helps explain how I did the things I did, but it doesn’t mitigate them.
    I WAS FIRST born to the north of the city that was then called Antioch. The first indelible notch in my long record was the earthquake of 526. I had no perspective on it then, but in the years since, I’ve read every account I could find to compare to my own. My family survived, but it left many thousands dead. Our parents had gone to the market that day, and I was alone with my older brother, fishing in the Orontes, when it happened. I remember falling on my knees as the earth rolled under us in waves. For reasons I can’t explain I got up again and walked unsteadily into the river. I can still remember standing in water up to my neck, feeling the syncopated roll of one surface under the other, and then suddenly ducking under, my eyes open wide and my arms out at either side for balance. I lifted my feet from the ground and stretched out until I was parallel with the river. I rolled until I was face up and saw the sky through the water. I saw the way the light lost its certainty under there, and I felt I understood something about it. I have known a true mystic well enough to be sure I am not one, but for a moment the ticking of time was silenced and I saw through the fabric of this world to eternity. I didn’t process it then, but I’ve dreamed it a thousand times since.
    My brother shouted curses at me to come back and then followed me when I didn’t. I think he meant to pummel me and drag me back to shore, but the sensations were so peculiar he stood a few yards from me, his face suspended over the river in a look of abstraction. I came back up to the surface, and we waited for the shore to go back to normal. And even when it did, I remember walking home, keeping a wondering eye on the ground as it passed under my feet.
    WE WERE PROUD subjects of Byzantium then. Belonging to a great empire made little difference in our small