What We Talk About When We Talk About Forgetting

by Mari Harrison

My daughter invented a game where you have to forget things on purpose. She’s nine. The rules change every time we play, which I think might be the point. Today’s version: we each say something true, then we have to convince the other person it never happened. Winner is whoever believes the lie first.

“You didn’t take me to the zoo last year,” she says.

“Yes I did. You fed the goats.”

“Nope. Never happened. You’re making it up.”

The thing is, I’m not sure. We’ve gone to the zoo many times, but did we go last year? I think we did and  there’s a photo on my phone of goats, but I can’t remember taking it. No timestamp or location tag because I turned all that off years ago. Just goats. Could be any zoo, any time. Could be someone else’s photo I saved and forgot about.

“Okay,” I say. “We didn’t go to the zoo last year.”

She grins. “I win.”

But here’s what happens: I actually can’t remember now. The more I try to recall the specific zoo trip, the more it dissolves. Did we go? Is the photo even mine? I could check my credit card statements, look for a zoo admission charge, ask my wife. But that feels like cheating. The game has rules, even if they’re always changing. Once you agree to forget, you have to commit.

Iris is better at this game than I am. But here's what I've noticed: the game only works because memory is already unreliable. I'm not misremembering because Iris is convincing. I'm misremembering because that's what memory does. The game just makes it visible.

Three Ways to Meet Your Wife

I can’t remember when I met my wife. We’ve been married ten years, together for twelve. You’d think I could pinpoint that life-changing moment. But when I try to locate it in my memory, I find three different versions, and I’m not sure which one actually happened.

Version A: We met at a party. She was standing by the kitchen counter, arguing with someone about whether fish feel pain. I thought she was wrong but interesting and beautiful. We talked for two hours. I got her number.

Version B: We met at a coffee shop. I asked what she was reading. She said it was about the history of salt, which seemed like the most boring topic imaginable, but she made it sound fascinating. We talked until they kicked us out at closing.

Version C: We met on a dating app. Her profile said she liked hiking, which was a lie. My profile said I liked cooking, which was also a lie. Our first date was at a Thai restaurant. We bonded over mutual deception.

I’ve told all three of these stories at various times. To friends, to colleagues, at dinner parties. People never call me out on the contradictions because they’re not keeping track. Why would they? It’s not their memory.

But here’s the disturbing part: I can construct a convincing narrative for each version. I can fill in sensory details, dialogue, what we were wearing. The party story feels true because I remember her green sweater. The coffee shop story feels true because I remember the terrible coffee. The dating app story feels true because I remember both of us ordering pad thai.

At least two of these memories are completely fabricated. Maybe all three. My wife says we met at a bookstore, in the philosophy section. She made a joke about Kant. I have no memory of this whatsoever.

Once, we were looking through old photos and she found one of her standing in front of a bookshelf. I’m in the background, blurry, younger, reaching for something on a high shelf. She showed me the photo and said, “See? The bookstore. I told you.”

I still don’t remember it. The photo proves nothing except that we were both in a bookstore once. It could have been any day, even before we met.

The Experiment

After Iris invented the forgetting game, I got curious. I started trying to deliberately forget things. Small things at first. Where I parked the car. What I had for breakfast. My coworker’s name.

The car was easy. I parked in a different spot every day and never looked back at the lot as I walked away. Within a week, I’d lost the car three times. Had to wander the garage pressing the key fob, following the beep.

Breakfast was harder. I kept a journal for a month, writing down what I ate. Then I stopped writing it down and tried to recall what I’d had this morning, yesterday, last Saturday. I couldn’t, not with any certainty. Toast? Maybe. Cereal? Possibly. The memories blurred together into a generic breakfast experience that could have been any morning from my entire life.

My coworker’s name was the easiest and most disturbing. His name is Salem, which is unique and should be hard to forget, right?

I work in insurance, processing claims, and Salem sits three cubicles over. We don’t collaborate on projects. We just exist in the same office. I started by avoiding saying his name in conversation, using “hey” or “could you” instead of the actual name.

It took six weeks, but the name disappeared. I knew it started with “S” and that it was uncommon. When I tried very hard to remember, I thought “Spencer,” but was aware that was wrong. I just couldn’t access the right name. I didn’t feel that I’d forgotten it, really. It was more that the pathway to that information had been severed. The memory was there somewhere, but I’d lost the map.

One day I saw his name on an email and thought, “Who’s Salem Brenner?” Then I remembered. That’s him. We’ve worked together for four years.

I could have looked at the nameplate in his desk at any time, but that would have ruined the experiment.

What My Daughter Remembers (Part 1)

“Tell me about when I was born,” Iris says. We’re in the car on Route 9, headed to her piano lesson. Saturday afternoon traffic in the valley is always bad, but I enjoy the time with her.

“You were born on a Monday afternoon,” I say. “It was raining.”

“What else?”

“Your mom was in labor for fourteen hours. You were so red you looked angry and you had so much hair! The nurses were surprised.”

“Did I cry?”

“Yes. Very loud.”

“Did you cry?”

I think about this. Did I cry? I remember feeling overwhelmed. I remember the smell of the hospital, the sound of machines beeping, the weight of my daughter in my arms. But did I cry?

“I don’t remember,” I say, honestly.

“Mom says you cried.”

“Then I probably did.”

But I don’t know. I remember thinking I should cry. I remember watching other fathers cry in movies and wondering if I was broken because I felt numb instead of overwhelmed with emotion. I know I held Iris and thought, “this is my daughter,” over and over, trying to make it feel real.

Maybe I did cry and I’ve forgotten. Maybe I didn’t and my wife misremembers. Maybe we’re both wrong about different parts of the same day.

“What was the first thing you said to me?” she asks.

“I said, ‘Hello, Iris. Welcome to the world.’”

“That’s boring.”

She’s right, it is boring. It’s too perfect, too scripted. Real life isn’t that clean. The first thing I said to my daughter was probably something like “oh shit” or “you look like an old man” or nothing at all because I was too stunned to speak. But I’ve told the “Hello, Iris” story so many times that it’s the official version. It’s the one that gets repeated at birthday parties and family gatherings, and the one Iris will tell her own children someday if she has them.

The truth has been overwritten by the cleaner story.

The Rules (Version 2)

Iris’s forgetting game has evolved. Now we take turns telling stories about our day, but we have to include one lie. The other person has to guess what’s false. If you guess wrong, the lie becomes true.

Today she tells me she saw a dog at school, a blue one. It could talk and it said her drawing was very good. Then she went to music class and played the xylophone. Then she had chicken nuggets for lunch.

“The blue dog,” I say. Obviously it’s the blue dog.

“Wrong!” She’s delighted. “That’s not the one I wanted you to guess! I meant the xylophone was the lie. We played recorders! That means the blue dog is real now!”

“That’s not how the game works.”

“Uhhuh! Is too,” she says. “I make the rules.”

She’s cheating, obviously. She’s changing the rules mid-game so she wins. But she’s nine and having fun, and so am I. So now, in our shared history, there was a blue talking dog at her school today. This really happened and we are not allowed to question it.

My turn. I tell her I went to work, processed claims about water damage and car accidents, and during lunch I saw a man juggling fire in the parking lot.

“The juggler,” she says confidently.

She’s right. There was no juggler. I ate lunch at my desk while I processed seventeen claims and answered emails. I had the same day I’ve had a thousand times before. But if I admit she’s right, the juggler disappears forever. So I lie.

“Wrong. Everything was true. I really did see him.”

She narrows her eyes. “Now you’re cheating.”

“I make the rules too,” I say.

The fire juggler enters our mythology. Later, when Emily asks how my day was, Iris interrupts: “Dad saw a fire juggler!”

Emily looks at me. “Really?”

I shrug. “Those are the rules.”

But here’s what’s happening: I can see the fire juggler now in the constructed space where memories live. He’s wearing a black vest. There are three torches, each with orange and blue flames. The image is clear and specific and completely false.

Next week, if someone asks me if I’ve ever seen a fire juggler, I’ll probably say yes. I might even tell them about the parking lot and describe the vest and the flames. The lie will have calcified into truth.

What I Remember About My Father

My father died when I was ten. I have a few clear memories of him. Everything else is reconstructed from photographs, stories other people told, and general impressions.

Memory 1: He taught me to ride a bike. I was five. He ran alongside me, holding the seat, then let go without telling me. I didn’t realize I was riding alone until I looked back and he was twenty feet behind me, waving. I felt betrayed and triumphant at the same time.

Memory 2: We went fishing once. I caught nothing. He caught three bass and we ate them for dinner. They tasted like mud.

Memory 3: He had a temper. I remember him yelling, but I don’t remember what about. Just the volume, the redness of his face, the way I made myself small.

Memory 4: When I was very little, he read to me before bed. Always the same book. Something about a bear. Or a mouse. I can’t remember the story, just the sound of his voice, the weight of his hand on my head.

Those are my most clear memories. Maybe there’s a fifth if I count the time he took me to get ice cream, I dropped the cone immediately, and he bought me another one without being mad. But I’m not sure that one’s real. It has the quality of a story I’ve been told rather than something I experienced.

Most of what I know about my father comes from other people: He worked in sales and liked bourbon. At forty-seven, he died of a heart attack in his car, parked outside a Trader Joe’s on Route 9.  But those aren’t memories. Those are facts. I wasn’t there when he died. I was at school. Someone came and got me from class. I remember that part. Being called to the principal’s office. My mother’s face. The drive home in silence.

What I don’t remember: Whether he was happy. Whether he had regrets. What he thought about late at night or what he dreamed about. Whether he cried when I was born.

Lately, I’ve been sitting quietly and attempting to summon his face, his voice, some gesture or phrase that was distinctly his. But the more I concentrate, the more he dissolves. He has becoming a photograph and a collection of facts. A person who existed but whom I can’t quite access anymore.

Iris will do this to me someday, I think. I’ll become a handful of memories, many of them false, reconstructed from photographs and stories. She’ll remember things that never happened and she’ll forget things that did. She’ll tell her children about me and get the details wrong. This is how we lose people. Not all at once, but in pieces, over years, through the natural process of forgetting.

It’s fine. It has to be fine. There’s no other option.

The Experiment (Continued)

I tried to forget my brother’s phone number. The one he had for eighteen years.  It took months, but I did it. I know where to find it, but I can’t recite it from memory anymore. The digits are gone.

My wife thinks this is concerning. “What if there’s an emergency?” she asks. We’re in the kitchen in our place in Hadley, the rental we’ve been in for six years, the one with the leaky sink neither of us ever remembers to call the landlord about.

“I don’t call my brother when I get a flat.”

“A bigger emergency.”

“I’ll say ‘Siri, call Brian.”

“You’re being deliberately obtuse.”

She’s right. I am. But I’m also trying to prove something: we only remember what we practice remembering. That memory is a muscle that atrophies from disuse and that forgetting isn’t a failure of the brain but a feature. A necessary pruning.

We can’t remember everything. The brain would collapse under the weight of every trivial detail, every phone number and password and parking spot and breakfast. So we forget. And if we forget anyway, why not choose what to let go?

Brian’s phone number is useless information. I haven’t had to dial it from memory in years. The space it took up in my brain is better used for something else, though I’m not sure what. Maybe nothing. Maybe just space.

“You’re going to forget me next,” Emily says. My wife, who I met at a bookstore according to her or maybe at a party, according to me. Who exists in this kitchen right now, real and solid and looking at me like I’m a stranger.

“I could never forget you,” I say.

But that’s a lie. I’m forgetting her constantly. Forgetting what she looks like when she’s not right in front of me. When she’s away visiting her parents, I probably forget the exact shade of her hair and the specific pattern of freckles on her left shoulder. I’m losing details all the time and reconstructing them incorrectly, and she doesn’t know. Or maybe she does and doesn’t say anything because what would be the point?

What My Daughter Remembers (Part 2)

“Do you remember your grandmother?” I ask Iris. My mother, her grandmother, died three years ago. Iris was six.

“A little,” Iris says.

“What do you remember?”

“She had brown hair. And glasses.”

This is correct. My mother dyed her hair until the month before she died. And she wore glasses.

“Oh! She lived in that white house on the hill.”

Also correct.

“She had a dog.”

“Yes. Charlie.”

“I remember Charlie,” Iris says. “He was big and old. His licks were really sticky!”

Charlie died a year before my mother did. Iris met him twice, maybe three times. But she remembers him. Some things stick.

“What else do you remember about Grandma?”

“She made cookies once when we visited. But they were burned on the bottom,” she says. “And she had sparkly Christmas ornaments!”

I don’t remember the burnt cookies but Emily might. Or Iris might be constructing it from generic grandmother experiences.

“She smelled like flowers,” Iris adds.

She is right. My mother wore a floral perfume.

“I wish I remembered more,” Iris says.

“You remember enough.”

But she doesn’t, really. In ten years she’ll remember even less. The brown hair, the glasses, and Charlie will remain. Maybe the layout of her house and the ornaments. The burned cookies and the flower smell though? They’ll probably fade. Iris will remember the sense of having had a grandmother more than specific memories of who she was.

She might have more of my mother than I have of my father. Iris got to six years old with her grandmother. I got to ten with my father and I can only hold onto few clear memories. Maybe that’s just how it works. Maybe the younger you are when someone dies, the less you lose, because there was less to begin with.

The Rules (Final Version)

The game has changed again. Now Iris tells me something true, and then she decides which memories are worth keeping.

“We saw a turtle at the park,” she says. “Remember that.”

“Okay.”

“The librarian gave me a sticker. Forget that.”

“It’s gone.”

“You promised we’d get ice cream tomorrow. Remember that.”

“I remember.”

I’m pretty certain I didn’t promise ice cream,  but now we’ll have to get ice cream tomorrow or I’ll be breaking a promise. The forgetting game has become a memory creation game. Iris is building our shared history in real time, deciding what happened based on what she wants to have happened. I’m letting her do it because I like that we’re making memories.

Emily and I were looking at wedding photos last week, making an anniversary slideshow. She kept asking, “Do you remember this? Do you remember this?”

And I didn’t. Not most of it. I remembered photographs of our wedding and people telling me us was a beautiful ceremony. I remembered being stressed about the seating chart beforehand because our mother’s had decided to seat an uncle with his ex- wife.

But the actual day was a blur. Who did I dance with? What did the cake taste like? What did we talk about during dinner? All gone. I could reconstruct it from photographs, videos, and other people’s memories and build a plausible version of the day. Is it better to admit that the wedding exists now only as evidence that it happened, but the experience itself is lost?

Emily got quiet when I told her this. Later she said, “Sometimes I feel like I’m married to someone who’s not quite there.”

She’s right. I’m not quite there. I’m here, in this moment, but I’m losing pieces of every other moment as soon as it passes. We’re all doing it, but maybe I’m just noticing it more because of the game.

This happens to everything eventually. Experience becomes a photograph, the photograph becomes a memory, and memory becomes story. Together they become artifact, which becomes…nothing. Aren’t we all moving toward erasure? Isn’t the forgetting gradual enough that we don’t notice until huge chunks of our lives are gone?

I’m thirty-eight years old. I’ve been alive for approximately 13,920 days. I can actively remember maybe a hundred of them. Probably less. The other 13,820 days are gone. They happened. I lived through them. But they might as well not have existed for all the trace they’ve left.

What did I do on March 14, 2019? No idea. April 3, 2015? Gone. Wednesday of last week? Couldn’t tell you. The forgetting is so complete it’s almost beautiful, unless I think about it too hard.

What I’m Trying to Remember

My daughter’s face. This minute, exactly as it is right now. Her adult teeth have mostly come in and she has a scar on her chin from falling off the monkey bars two years ago. Her damp hair has red highlights left over from the summer sun. It is in a ponytail, higher on one side than the other because she did it herself in the car on the way home from swimming lessons. She’s wearing a purple shirt with a unicorn on it and jeans with a hole in the knee.

We’re sitting on the porch in Hadley. It’s a Saturday afternoon in October. The leaves are turning and there’s a chill in the air, but the sun is warm. Traffic is distant white noise.

I’m trying to memorize this moment. This version of her. Because in a year she’ll look different. In five years she’ll look completely different. In twenty years I’ll struggle to remember what she looked like at nine. The photographs I’ll have of now will lie. Picture flatten people into images. They don’t capture the way she moves, the squeal in her giggles, or the quality of her attention when she’s interested in something.

I’m trying to hold on to all of this, but I know memory isn’t designed for this kind of preservation. It’s designed to extract patterns, to generalize, and to forget the specific in favor of the useful.

Iris at nine will blur into Iris at eight, ten, and eleven.  The memory will become “young Iris” rather than “Iris at exactly nine years old on this Saturday in October.” The scar will fade along with the memory of it. Her lopsided ponytail will blend into all the other ponytails from all the other days.

The End of the Game

“Let’s play the forgetting game,” Iris says. “I’m going to tell you something and you have to forget it immediately.”

“That’s not the game.”

“New rules,” she says. She’s gotten so good at this. Creating rules, bending them, understanding that the game is less about winning and more about seeing what happens when you mess with the structure of memory itself. This child understands something about consciousness that most adults never think about.

“I get to tell you a secret and then you have to forget it so it stays a secret forever.”

Ah, my little philosopher. If I forget the secret, does that mean it was never told? If a tree falls in my front yard and no one remembers it, did it make a sound?

“Go ahead,” I say.

She leans in close and whispers in my ear. “I love you.”

Then she pulls back and says, “Okay. Forget it.”

“I can’t forget that.”

“Those are the rules.”

“I’m not forgetting that you love me.”

“You have to or I win.” She’s grinning, pleased with herself for finding the one thing I won’t forget.

But here’s the thing: I will forget. Maybe not today or tomorrow or next year, and never that she loves me. But eventually I’ll forget this moment, this specific declaration of love. It will blur into all the other times she’s said “I love you” and those will blur into a general sense of being loved. But her nine-year-old whisper, the way she smells of strawberry shampoo as she leaned in close to say it, that will probably dissolve.

And that’s fine. That has to be fine. Because love isn’t about remembering every instance of being told you’re loved. Love is about the accumulation of moments that shape who you become. The pattern they create is what matters.

Iris may forget this game, this afternoon, and this conversation. She’ll forget the goats at the zoo on the outing that may or may not have happened. She’ll forget the fire juggler who definitely didn’t happen. She’ll forget probably ninety percent of everything I’ve ever said to her. But she’ll remember something, some shape of me and the outline of my love.

“Okay,” I say. “I forgot.”

“No you didn’t.”

“Yeah I did. What were we talking about?”

She laughs. She knows I’m lying. But she lets me win this round.