The road behind you crumbles, more the further back you go,
The road ahead is unfinished, built on all that you know.
Your memory is incomplete. That's just one of the limitless, unfortunate Facts of Life. After your name is a number we invented that decides how long you lasted between you first opening your eyes and closing them for the last time. Your lifetime of events happens between the two points. Our minds are far too small and too busy to hold every single one of them.
Somewhere, left on the road behind you are first words, learning your five senses, the knowledge of just how imperceptibly small we really are. There are lost birthday parties, first words, conversations, purchases, journeys. Things you know you have done, but to actually see them again - it's easier to look for a blue sky in a thunder storm.
These memories must go somewhere. They hold too much of our lives, too much of our energies to simply stop - a heart beating slowly is still a heartbeat, is still a life. Though we cannot see them, we feel their weight and feel their pain. Memories are living entities but cannot die within us, or else we could still see them. No. Unwanted memories flee as we breathe in sleep, as we sigh in sunlight, as we watch and observe and live and replace them. They are not needed, to us, so find use among themselves.
So exists this idea of the Past. It's where your long lost memories have hidden, behind that word because we easily give it so much freedom. "What's passed is past." Anything could hide there, if it wanted. We'd be too preoccupied looking at the future. The road ahead.
So exists this Past, this plain of history, of decayed time, of the forgotten all mixed into one. Of course we don't know what they look like - we don't remember. They're now blank pages in books, songs turned silent, canvases wiped clean.
All of them are managed by one being. It moves among our memories like Death among its passengers - respectful, watching but never moving out of turn. It turns them a blind eye, in forms greyed and near forgotten, needed only when we so choose.
This being is called Recollection. On the off chance a memory needs to be resurrected. To be returned. Recollection tends to the job and sends back one of its infinite children and the Past, just for a moment, becomes Present.
But that memory will come back. Eventually, they all do. Pushed out and defeated by whatever new comes from the road ahead. They wait patiently, though. The process repeats, again and again. New descending upon the Old.
Just wait. For the time, when every last of our memories have fled and Recollection quietly becomes one with them. When they are everything we have left.
When we meet what's at the end of the road.
