Can you, without resorting to a lobotomy or suffering a car accident, ever completely obliterate the memory of someone so that it is as though he or she never existed?
It is a fair question in this age of online communication - I can quite conceivably never see a particular person in the flesh again, but their existence can still be prolonged in a parallel online universe.
Three days ago, I said my goodbyes to someone forever. Thankyou for the last two years, but I'd rather not hear from you again now. I wish you well, but I hereby declare that Friday is a partition in time - you won't leak beyond today, for I have temporally sealed you.
Suffice to say, Monday sprung a leak. Sunday, too. The communication embago lasted perhaps 48 hours before history spilled over, staining the present with its retrospective prejudice.
It was broken not by a knock on the door or a telephone call, but by a message on a social networking site. How many paths that terminate with me must be twisted until they snap, leaving me falling through perfect space with no hope of ever being reached again, the ghost howling its thoughts into a vacuum?
Even if the virtual presence of this person can be erased once and for all, what about memories? Thoughts of Africa, of broiling in 37 degrees of sunshine, of this and that insignificant event which commingle to form a super or meta-memory?
But hold on. What differences are there between the ghost confined to the computer and the ghost confined to my mind?
Take this statement, or implication, uttered by the ghost confined to the computer: "I am in a relationship with someone new." It therefore follows that I am unlikely to broil in 37 degrees of sunshine again. "I broiled in 37 degrees of sunshine!" recalls the ghost confined to my mind.
Both ghosts are retrospective. There is more that unites them than divides them, as they play out their dance of the archives on the screen of my computer, and on the screen of my soul.
