keyword "translucence" title "a memory in water" in misc. flash fiction

I don’t believe in homeopathy, but I do believe in you.

If water could actually have memory, it could only remember the dirt and the sky from whence water endlessly recycles. If the dirt could have memory, it would remember us after our deaths along with that endless cycle of evaporating water. Nothing inanimate has a memory, even the ancient works carved into rocks or the new stories burnt into our computer magnets, that’s not memory, that is just code to be translated back into memory by a living mind to be understood. Water can’t remember one-millionth of something that was once inside it, only we can do that. For better and for worse, only humans can be so shaped by such a little trace of meaning, as a reminiscence or an ugly scar. Only us.

We also must consider, though, how nostalgia is so often a rusty bear trap. You can gnaw a leg off and hobble away lessened but still breathing or die there in the unforgiving maw of memory. There are times we must rip chunks of ourselves away to keep on moving forward. Sometimes hanging on is just a slowed-down method with which to hang ourselves, bleed ourselves out dry over time until we no longer gush blood-red but only the translucence of a memory in water.

Which, of course, cannot remember anything.

When our cities have all rusted away after we are gone, only the frozen poop of rich dilettantes who paid peasants to help them climb Mount Everest will remain. These will be our monuments, the last grim remainder of our age. There are hills of it up there now already at the base camps, the crap of millionaires pretending to be heroes and it is all that will outlive us as proof that we were here. The frozen feces of those born to privilege, squeezed out while they played pretend is all the aliens will find, at least, that’s what it looks like now unless we change.

Our legacy is at best memetic. What we say and do are what will outlive us as our souls, even if we’re shot dead for saying what we feel, those words will endure for at least a while. We choose what will endure by doing the right thing, once in a while, on rare occasion. It can endure beyond us for perhaps at least one part per million.

We disappear into culture’s solution, diluted down to almost nothing but even more powerful as traces in memory’s sea. Sort of like homeopathy if homeopathy weren’t confidence-man hibbity-jibbity. It may be bad as medicine but in our words and deeds, let us be good memes, even we’re cut down for it, especially if we’re cut down for it. We can still clean this water if we really try.

As you float along, you can leave traces of this world’s cure behind in deeds and words said true. I don’t believe in homeopathy, but I do believe in you.