When I Forgot

When I forgot Trigonometry, it wasn't because of a book, or lack of a book. I was breathing and breathing, and I meant to keep breathing. All I meant to do was keep breathing. My mind was so full at the time, like a bucket of water, that if I hadn't been concentrating my breath might have slipped right over the side, disappeared, never to return. We were in a real life or death scenario, me and Trig.

I tried to picture how I would miss Trigonometry, once it was gone; caressing a portrait of not-quite-calculus as I pined, sorting through memories of abstract, disconnected thoughts. And then I realized that it wasn't anything I'd been holding at all.

Energy like a laugh was inside, beams of the dawn snaking out of my gut and infiltrating my brain, illuminating corners where emotion had hid. Trigonometry was already a ghost, an elusive element that I'd once met face to face in the dark of night. Knowledge like wind that never settles.

Once you put your mind to it, there’s nothing you can’t get rid of. And once you start tossing things out, you find yourself wanting to get rid of everything. It’s as if you’d gambled away almost all of your money and decided, What the hell, I’ll bet what’s left. Too much trouble to cling to the rest.

-Haruki Murakami, Man-Eating Cats