If you were to map out your wandering thoughts. Race with it on the fastest machine available to archive your dictations. What would fail you first. The inability to translate the thought’s current destination to words, or the inability to hurry the enunciation of words. What then would you do with such an archive? Under what retirement circumstance would you need to use such a map?

Like photographs taken on trip, revisited when one needs the image as a key into another time and situation. Gradually, it fades into nostalgia. When the user departs, and the heir to the documents can only guess what happened and whether it actually mattered.

If such a continuous mapping exercise existed, when then would the old become obsolete? New maps generated over existing territories, burying the previous under newer conclusions. If an old feature doesn’t translate onto the new mapping, has it by choice ceased to be important or been confiscated by the parasite of time and its feeding upon our memory?

Even photographs cannot preserve it. As a plant that needs constant watering and care, if we neglect that memory for too long, it will not be around the next time we return to it. Its original label still stuck in the crusted soil, but nothing to substantiate it. A small thought that is not recorded is like a wind-carried seed, passing by but never implanted. Some thoughts are heavier than others and more hardy in variety. It might not prosper, and we might never visit it again, but it is there, refusing to whither and unconsciously affecting the ecosystem of our being.