Three Days of Happiness

150
several meters ahead of her. I carried the conversation myself.
“But I remember you very well. It’s not necessarily true that you’ll
have a good memory just because you’re young. I’m still only 20,
but I’ve forgotten a lot about the past. However happy or sad
something is, you’ll soon forget it if you don’t get a chance to recall
it. What people don’t realize is that they’ve forgotten about
forgetting. If everyone really preserved the happiest memory from
their past perfectly, they’d only be sadder living in their relatively
hollow present. And if everyone preserved the worst memory from
their past perfectly, well, they’d still be sad. Everyone just
remembers what it’s inconvenient not to remember.”
There was no argument nor agreement. The old woman was as still
as a scarecrow.
“And though memory is so unstable like that, you still haven’t faded
in my mind because of how much you helped me back then. It was
a very uncommon thing. Of course, ten years ago, I was rarely
grateful to people. Even when adults were nice to me, I was
convinced they were just in a position where they had to be, so it
wasn’t a pure act of good will. ...Yes, I was a charmless child. A kid
like that would even consider running away from home. When I was
8, or when I was 9, I forget exactly when, I got in a fight with my
mother and left home. I’ve completely forgotten what we fought
about. It must have been something stupidly trivial.”
I sat beside the old woman, leaned on the back of the bench, and
gazed up at distant pylons and the clouds in the blue sky.
“I hadn’t thought ahead much, so I went to kill time at the candy