Chapter Two — The Entity of Memory

There is something about antique shops that always makes me walk into them.

No matter what city I am in, if I notice an antique shop, a secondhand store or an exhibition of old objects, I will most likely stop.

I love wandering among the shelves, looking at the objects and trying to imagine the lives they had before they arrived there.

An old pocket watch, an embroidered scarf, a small jewelry box.

Seemingly, ordinary objects.

But each one of them once had a home.

Someone chose it, paid for it, carried it in their hands. Perhaps received it as a gift from a loved one. Perhaps used it every day, and perhaps kept it for special occasions.

And then, at some stage, he parted from it.

Sometimes I wonder how such objects reach antique shops.

Did someone die, and his children did not know what to do with the things he left? Did a family move house? Did a person decide to part from an object that accompanied him for years?

I touch the objects gently, turn them over, examine the marks time left in them.

A small scratch in the wood. A stain that can no longer be removed. Initials engraved in metal.

Those marks intrigue me more than the objects themselves.

Because behind every such mark there may hide a story I will never know.

⸻

In one of the shops I entered a small room that was packed almost to the ceiling.

On the walls hung old pictures, and in the glass cabinets lay silverware, watches and jewelry. A smell of old wood and paper stood in the air.

On a low shelf I found a jewelry box of dark wood.

It was small, with slightly rusted hinges and a lining of fabric that had already lost its original color.

I opened it.

It was empty.

And still, I lingered over it.

Who was the woman who held it? What did she keep inside it? Would she open it every morning to choose a piece of jewelry, or only on special occasions?

Or perhaps it belonged to a man who kept small letters or mementos in it.

I had no way of knowing.

It was precisely the not-knowing that made me keep looking at it.

I thought about how every person has a whole world of memories, but most of them are written nowhere.

We remember conversations, smells, glances, small moments to which no one but us would attribute importance.

And what happens to all of those when we are no longer here?

Do they simply disappear?

⸻

I held the box in my hands, and in my thoughts I tried to imagine memory itself.

In the previous chapter, when I thought about time, I could not give it a shape. This time, a figure did rise in my imagination: an older woman, with a face whose age is hard to guess.

Perhaps because memory, in my eyes, always carries something of the past with it.

I imagined her sitting across from me, and I ask her the question that occupied me.

"Do you keep everything that was?"

"No," she replied. "And perhaps that is one of the most common mistakes about me."

"What do you mean?"

"People sometimes think of me as an archive. A place where everything that happened is kept as it was."

There was something surprising in her answer. After all, I too had assumed that memory is a kind of collection of moments from the past, which one can open and pull out whatever one is looking for.

"But human memory is not an exact archive," she continued. "It changes, it mixes, and at times it also completes details that were not preserved."

"So what I remember did not necessarily happen exactly that way?"

"Not necessarily. You remember the event as it remained within you, and not always as it was in reality."

I looked again at the jewelry box.

"Meaning, even if I met its original owners, the story they would tell me about it might not be accurate?"

"Certainly. And perhaps two people who knew the same box would tell you two different stories."

"That is interesting," I said. "We trust our memories so much. Sometimes we even build on them the way we understand ourselves."

"And yet," she replied, "you surely know cases in which you and another person remember the same conversation completely differently."

I smiled.

"More than one case."

"And both of you may be convinced that you are right."

"So who is right?"

"Sometimes it is possible to establish what happened. Sometimes not. But even when there are facts that can be verified, the way each person experienced them may be different."

I pondered that.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons two people can grow up in the same house and tell different stories about their childhood.

They shared the same rooms, the same parents, sometimes even the same events, but not necessarily the same experience.

⸻

"If so," I asked, "what happens to the memories we forget?"

"Some of them are no longer available to you. Others may return following a smell, a sound, a place or a word. And there are also experiences you do not remember explicitly, but they influenced you."

"Meaning, something I have already forgotten may still be influencing me?"

"Yes. But it is important to distinguish between an influence and a memory that can be pulled out and told. They are not the same thing."

I remembered old songs I sometimes hear by chance.

A few seconds of melody are enough to bring me back to a whole period of my life.

I do not always remember a particular event. Sometimes it is only a feeling. As if for a moment I returned to being the woman I was when I heard the song for the first time.

"There is something strange in that," I said. "A song can bring back to me a feeling I did not know I still carried within me."

"Music can be a strong cue for memory," she replied. "And also smells and places. At times the connection is made without your being aware of it."

"And if I cannot manage to remember, does that mean that moment was not important?"

"No. Not everything important is kept in memory, and not everything that is kept is equally important."

That answer made me stop.

I thought of all the days I do not remember.

Whole years of my life are made of thousands of moments I have no way to reconstruct.

And yet, I lived them.

I laughed, worried, loved, was disappointed, was moved.

The fact that I do not remember them does not cancel their existence.

⸻

"There is something I want to understand," I went on. "Why do we sometimes remember precisely the things we would prefer to forget?"

"Because memory does not work according to what is pleasant for you to remember. Experiences with strong emotion in them may be engraved in you, especially when they are connected to danger, to loss or to a significant change."

"But sometimes I want to remember a loved one without the pain of his absence appearing immediately after."

"And do you manage?"

"Sometimes. There are memories that bring a smile to me. Others still hurt. And there are days when the same memory does both."

"That is because your connection to that memory keeps changing, even if the event itself has ended."

"So memories change with us too?"

"Yes. Every time you remember, you meet the past from within who you are today."

I loved that thought.

Perhaps because it explained to me why there are things I understood only years after they happened.

A conversation that once seemed unimportant to me took on a different meaning. A decision I did not understand in the past suddenly seemed more sensible. Even about certain people I learned to think differently.

"So in ten years I may remember my life today differently?"

"Very likely."

"And which version will be the true one?"

"Perhaps in each one there will be something true and something missing."

⸻

I looked again at the objects on the shelves.

"I love imagining the stories behind them," I said. "But now I wonder whether I am not inventing lives for them that never were."

"You certainly invent possibilities," she replied. "You do not know the people who held them."

"So what actually draws me to them?"

"Perhaps the knowledge that before you there was someone else here. A person who lived a whole life, with thoughts, desires and worries not so different from yours."

I gazed at a pocket watch lying in the glass cabinet.

I imagined a man taking it out of his pocket at a train station, looking at the hour and waiting for someone.

Perhaps that is really how it was used.

And perhaps it lay for years in a drawer, without anyone opening it.

Both stories are possible, and I have no way to choose between them.

"Perhaps I am not looking for the memories themselves," I said, "but for the possibility of imagining the people who were here before me."

"And what do you feel when you imagine them?"

"A certain closeness. Even though I do not know them. I look at a small object and think of a person who had a whole world, just as I have a whole world."

"And do you know what was important to him?"

"No. And that is perhaps what intrigues me."

"Then leave room also for what you do not know," she replied.

I agreed with her.

There is something beautiful in the mystery of old objects, but also something that demands humility. The story I imagine is not necessarily their story.

⸻

"I want to ask you something else," I said.

"Please."

"Does a person continue to exist in the memories of others?"

She hesitated, at least so I imagined.

"It depends on what you mean by 'to exist.'"

"If someone dies, but his children remember him, and his friends tell about him, and the things he taught keep influencing people — is something of him still here?"

"His influence can continue to exist. The stories about him can pass on. But there is no answer in that to the question of whether he himself continues to exist."

"I know," I said. "And perhaps that is a question that belongs elsewhere."

"Perhaps."

I thought about how, over the years, memories also pass between people.

A child tells his children about a grandfather they never knew. An old photograph sparks a conversation. A recipe passes through a family. A sentence a person used to say becomes an expression everyone uses.

Sometimes we do not even know from whom we learned something.

"It moves me," I said. "The thought that a person can influence people who were not yet born when he lived."

"And that happens in many ways," she replied. "Not only through stories. Also through deeds, choices, creations and habits that pass on."

"But in the end even those stories may be forgotten."

"True."

This time she did not try to offer comfort.

And I valued that.

"Perhaps we want to believe that something of us will remain forever," I said.

"And perhaps you do not have to remain forever for your lives to have meaning."

I stayed with that thought for a while.

⸻

"There is another thing that occupies me," I said. "If I could choose, would I want to remember everything?"

"What do you think?"

At first the answer seemed clear to me.

How wonderful it would be to remember every conversation, every place, every face. To lose no detail of the years that passed.

But then I thought of painful moments.

Of words I would be glad had not been said. Of hard periods. Of things I learned to leave behind me.

"Perhaps not," I said. "Perhaps there is also importance in the ability to forget."

"Forgetting is part of the way human memory works. You cannot preserve every detail to the same degree, and you do not need all of them either."

"But I would like to choose what will remain and what will disappear."

"I imagine so."

I laughed quietly.

"I suppose not everything is given to our choice."

"No. But you can sometimes choose which memories to give room to in your life."

I thought of photo albums I had not opened in years, of people I mean to call to hear their stories, and of questions I never asked those who are no longer here.

Perhaps there are memories worth trying to preserve while it is still possible.

Not out of fear they will be forgotten, but out of a desire to know better the people and the lives around us.

⸻

I closed the jewelry box gently.

The conversation in my imagination had ended, but the questions kept occupying me.

I stood again in the small antique shop, among the packed shelves, with the box still in my hand.

I looked at it one more moment and decided to buy it.

I did not need it. Nor did I know what I would put in it.

But I loved the dark wood, the old hinges and the possibility that it was once part of the life of a person I will never know.

I did not know whether rings, letters or something else entirely had been kept in it.

And perhaps precisely because of that I wanted to take it with me.

The seller wrapped it in paper, and I went out into the street.

Outside, everything went on as usual. People hurried on their way, cars passed, and someone spoke on the phone beside the shop window.

I thought of all the shops I had visited, in all the cities, and of the countless objects that passed from hand to hand.

Each one of them was once new.

Each one of them belonged to someone's present.

And now it is part of the past, at least in our eyes.

But one day the objects in my home will also be old. Someone may open a drawer, find something I kept for years and wonder why it was important to me.

Perhaps he will invent a story for me.

Perhaps he will not think of me at all.

Or perhaps he will take the object home, as I took the box.

I will not know.

When I got home I placed it on the shelf.

Every so often I open it and look at its faded lining.

I still do not know to whom it belonged, and I do not know what it kept inside it.

Perhaps that is why I love antique shops so much.

They remind me that the world was full of stories before I arrived in it, and will keep filling with stories after me too.

And that thought did not sadden me.

It actually made me feel part of something bigger.

And I continued on my way.

Continue to Chapter Three: The Entity of Fear

© 2026 Nurit Rozenblat. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or distributed without the author's prior written permission.