The Persistence of Memory (Short Story)

Originally published March 2, 2025

Hi! Happy March! I wanted to show y’all this old thing from my creative writing class back in high school. It is very, very indicative of my mind at the time, and looking back at it is always a funny little experience- I was quite melodramatic. The original prompt was to write a story based on The Persistence of Memory, by Salvador Dali, but the title of the painting itself gave way for more inspiration at the time. Anywhoooo, enjoy!

She walked a thousand roads, but she always found her way back to him, somehow. And she didn’t want to. Each road she traveled was another path she took to get farther and farther away from him and his memory, yet they all led back around to the very person she tried to run away from. No matter how much her head told her she needed to move on, her heart just wouldn’t listen. 

She tried very hard, and we have to give her credit for that, but in the same way a worker bee must follow its queen to every hive she finds herself in, our heroine never strayed too far away from her lost love. It was inevitable. 

He showed up in the clothes she wore, in the music she listened to, in the books she read, in the way she talked, and the ongoings she found while walking through life. As they grew in life for that brief period in time, they grew together, and slowly she became him. So for our heroine, you can only imagine how difficult it must’ve been for her to erase him when he’d been a force so great it meant she had to erase part of herself as well. 

Now I know, how backward it would have been for our heroine to erase herself. She knew this, you see, and so rather than try to remove him completely, she hid him away. She closed him in drawers she would never open again and hid him away in the pages of her diary. Although as I’m sure you’ve already put together, this wasn’t enough for her to drain her putrid feelings of love and loss.  Just because she locked her mementos and memories away, didn’t mean our dear heroine forgot a single detail of her lost year, and it didn’t mean it would hurt her any less.  

You shouldn’t worry, because eventually, our heroine will shed the remaining shell her lost love had left surrounding her. And for those little parts in the movies and songs she loved, she wouldn’t look at them with the same contempt she does now. She will look at these things and reminisce about the stories they hold, the person who gave them to her, and the bittersweet memories that derived from them. But that’s far into the future. 

In our current story, our heroine locked away her memories not only in an effort to keep the dying part of herself alive but also she did it because that was the only way for her to stop going back to them, constantly. Which she would do, until she finally forced herself to stop, much farther into the future. 

I’m sure by now you’ve gathered that our heroine possesses a nine-track mind. Whether to let go or move on or keep fighting or give up or go running back or beg to try again. She was in a thousand different positions and truly, in her heart, she didn’t know which to pick. You and I know it would be best, logically, for her to move on, and deep inside her, she knew it too.  

But those damn memories kept crawling back. 

Springing up from filled drawers and messy love poems and old gifts and the peridot bracelet still dangling from her wrist, the memories were always there. No matter where our heroine walked, they followed her around like a boy follows his friends in the schoolyard. She felt time moving all around her. As you know, dear reader, his life sure moved without her. And naturally, the life of the miniature version of himself that she still was moved without her as well. She stayed standing in the memories of what they once were. She stayed still in the spot she stood when she lost that piece of her. Time warped around her as she ran in circles, farther and closer to the boy she would never have again. The memories floated to the surface again, and time and time again she pushed them farther and farther down. But you and I know our heroine better than anyone. 

No matter how much her feet moved forward, the persistence of memory kept her still. 

With love, Willianny