We re-write our memories each time we access them, and depending on our emotional state while accessing the memory, the narrative can change. Is that terrifying? I’m not sure. Shows how reliably unreliable humans are, I suppose. Certain clients are clear as day in my mind, will that fade? I don’t want to know.

There are the work memories, the quadriplegic client who makes amazing pierogi dumplings and sells them to his neighbours. Running through a forest in god-knows-where, with my bra in hand towards the driver car to get away from the clients that were a little too creepy. The time I fell asleep on top of a client who had also fallen asleep from me giving him a massage. I remember distinctively the “Divorce for Dummies” book he had in his cabin. The time another told you he had cancer and was dying in the next few months so wanted to treat himself.

I obliged, happily.

The volunteer memories, the daughter dying down the hallway from her mother in the Hospice I worked at. The father dying in his thirties while his mother-in-law died months before him, the wife and three kids visited both. The girl I couldn’t visit her room because she was so close to my own age of 21. Talking on her phone, cared about her hair straightener.

Her freshly dyed hair, pink.

The fancy friend memories, the biochemist and naughtiness of breaking into the hot tub room in his apartment building. Oh, before you think it’s too fancy, it had a games room for the older residents that mainly inhabited the building. The ethanol he would steal from his laboratory smells like nail polish varnish, tastes like nothing. Not the college Vodka you usually can afford…