Four minutes to read.
I’m told that I had a good time in Ecuador. I have no reason to doubt it. No way to dispute it.
The day started out with a sixteen-mile bus ride from Quito to Mitad del Mundo—site of the hundred-foot-tall Equator Monument. At one point during the excursion, my wife photographed me standing astride the painted yellow line demarcating the hemispheres.
More pictures prove my presence at the planetarium, ethnographic museum, the beer, cocoa and chocolate exhibits. Apparently, I read placards confirming that the indigenous Quitu people—“Qui” means middle, “tu” means earth—knew about the equator starting around 2000 B.C.—long before 1736 when a French scientific expedition rediscovered it.
By the afternoon, I was back in Quito. Sitting at my hotel window staring at the undusted windowsill, my short-term memory started working again. I knew where I was, but not how I got there.
My wife tells me that she first noticed something amiss when I repeated questions, over and over, as if they had never been asked. I failed to recall exhibits just minutes after visiting them. My mind was unable to hang on to myself.
For three and half hours—really forever—I lost all memory. Like I was never there. Saw nothing. Tasted nothing. Smelled nothing. Said nothing. Heard nothing. Learned nothing. What I imagine pain-free dying is like.
To this day, from personal experience, I can’t tell you a single thing about the equator. I don’t fear losing the memory of it because I don’t have any memory of it to lose. I only know what my wife reports happened and what I’ve have read in books and blogs.
My doctor diagnosed my experience—better to say, my non-experience—as transient global amnesia. The ideal ailment for a world traveler not to get. Like sightseeing inside a black hole.
Memory is an essential travel tool. Memory is where I deposit menus, guidebook information, receipts, tickets, performance times—all the detritus of a journey mapped and remembered.
As if writing a journal that only I read or painting a canvas only I see, travel is the way I create new memories. In my private travel photo album, the equator page is missing.
Holding on to a travel memory is the most selfish thing I do. Without memory, I am blocked from enjoying the equator again or from sharing it with others. There are no good old days without memory.
Ancient ruins and collapsed cities are history’s reminder that everything decays, that I’m not indestructible. With aging comes fading memory. Taste buds are less acute. My vision is weaker. My legs work slower.
I’m working at forgetting that I forgot. When I fail to not remember not remembering, my day is clumsy, awkward, halting. Terrified that my existence will be erased, my heart races. Dizzy and feeling frail, I rest myself.
I guess I’m fine now, but it’s hard to know what I don’t know. I’m in Disneyland sitting on a bench outside the Candy Palace on Main Street. My wife and kids are inside doing damage to our bank account.
For now, for right now, the moment is memorable.