The Vulture

The accuracy of my memory stopped concerning me when I realized that I could no longer remember much of anything. I feel sure that each new memory erases an old one. My memory is eaten away at by something within me and because of this, I log everything that happens in my day. I note conversations and how I feel about them; I write down the color of the sky. My notebook is my second skin. Yet, each moment that I attack with my pen is already dead. I am feeding on the carrion of the past and now makes me hungry.

Detrite

Detritivores are organisms who feed on dead things. They eat rotting plant matter; the soggy orange leaves that pile in drains, moldy bark and decay. They also eat animal waste and some eat dead animals. Vultures are not detritivores. They are just scavengers. Examples of detritivores are worms, fungi, bacteria and protists.

The root word, detrite, means worn out material.

In a bar I had a conversation with a stranger about memory.

"When I was a kid, I remembered everything," he said to me, glugging at his beer.

"Yeah, I definitely remembered more than I do now." We ordered shots and drank them without really tasting or thinking. The bar was dark and seedy.
"Do you have any memories that aren't real?"
"Well," he said, "I suppose none of them are real, in a sense. I mean, we can't touch them. They are intangible but they are all we have."

There was a great deal more to this conversation, but I do not remember it, and I cannot remember the stranger's name. It has been eaten away, or it blends with many other nights like this one, talking to a stranger in a bar.