"Remembering is easy for me. Names. Birthdays. Phone numbers. Work schedules. Errands I need to do. The order of a shuffled deck of cards. The number of cigarettes I have consumed throughout the week. All small details come so easily with total clarity. My colleagues are impressed that they even claim it's my superpower, but they don't realize that having a memory as sharp as tack can be as much of a curse as it can be a blessing. That at the end of the day it leaves me sitting on the floor of my apartment, swigging a bottle of beer and staring at nothing but an empty wall.

"Sometimes it only takes the smallest of triggers like a word, a taste, or a song to bring it all back. Sometimes it only takes a clap of thunder, a taste of salt in the air, or the smell of rain on the ground to make me remember that day of September 1994.

"And when I turn my head to the side, I see the vision of her. Her smiling so radiantly as she skipped over the puddles and talked about the things I didn't know we had in common. I want to reach out and hold on to that little fragment of memory... but then I blink my bleary eyes and the vision disappears.

"It always happens. Always, that it's gotten to the point where I'm almost too afraid to blink.

"If her umbrella hadn't been viciously torn by the rain, if I hadn't leaped into that shed to dry up, or if the rain hadn't come at all, everything would have been different. I wouldn't have been like a moth drawn to her light. I wouldn't have been like this, gradually wasting my life with cheap beers and waiting for something that will never come my way—whatever that is, I don't know. I wonder what I would've been had I never known her.

"Ah, but I suppose it's not really worthy of contemplation. After all, I can't imagine what my life would be without her being a part of it. Her whom I've been separated so far away from. Her, who never returned my calls."