wake me up inside...

For the last few weeks the highpoint has been the radio show on Thursday afternoon called ThinkTank where the callers quiz the RJ on music trivia to win sponsored goodies. Usually some rare trivia gets shared which makes the show interesting. Regularly, I leave office at 6 just to be able to tune in while driving back. Speaks a lot about my life doesn’t it.

Anyway, the recent psychometric test found my score to be highest on spatial-visual intelligence followed by musical, intrapersonal and linguistic. I scored lowest on logical-mathematical which comes as no surprise. I remember only two telephone numbers and both of them I have had for the last several years. Once, in school, I had drawn bicycle wheels on the entire math notebook to find out the number of revolutions required to cover an asked distance. Precisely then, I guess, my parents gave up their dreams. More on that later. Only now, I have learnt the multiplication table along with my eight year old. In university, all my applied statistics used to take shape schematically on paper napkins while my partner crunched the numbers. My kith and kin are well aware of my severely challenged ability to comprehend anything numeric. I do not remember the silly SMS numbers that flash on TV to vote for the even sillier shows. I even skip the numbers in an advertisement and read them as ‘blah blah blah’.

Then again, I am the most illogical person around with impossible wishes and irrational reactions. Therefore, unlike DA, I cannot erase people as easily as their telephone numbers. For me, a person, thing or moment is tagged with a multi-sensory memory and filed in the deep crevice of my conscious from where they are impossible to dislodge. Then for years afterwards, I will relive those memories, often painfully, when triggered by a familiar phrase, a well-remembered tilt of the head, a similar posture, snatches of a tune, whiff of a perfume, a certain warmth of voice, a shared joke.

It would have been so much easier if I could put people in numeric context. His bank balance. Her shoe size. His height. Her age. His address. Her phone number. So much easier to erase when required. But that wouldn’t work for me. Unlike the old couple in the paint advertisement on TV, I will recall the colour, texture, smell, taste of all 'our' memory. So, for those I have lost through fate or frivolity, what remains are the myriad hued memories and of course the songs. ‘Our’ songs that will always remain even after the ‘our’ is rendered redundant.