Kelsey’s most marked departure from the blueprint of I Remember is his apostrophic address to some “you,” who, based on memories Kelsey says he can’t recall, seems be his partner in a doomed relationship that may be still ongoing, if only because it so stubbornly rises up to insist on being forgotten. The tone of these addresses is strikingly pure and direct, as Kelsey forgoes his usual remoteness to offer stark, searching confessions of personal inadequacy and pain. “I forget you need to feel safe, that you need a solution. You forget that I need that too.” Here, another person is, however briefly, allowed to take the helm of the operation called forgetting, so that she and Kelsey mirror each other even as they slip further apart. The tone is desolate, stiffening just slightly around the therapy-speak of “feel safe,” not to reject the sentiment but perhaps to mourn the reduction of vast and unruly human emotions to phrases that border on cliché. “When we fight,” he says, “it’s you forget versus I forget,” a mutual erosion of one person by another under the pressures of a great but frustrated love.
Remembering offers to put us back together, to re-member and re-assemble us even against the attritive onslaught of time. Forgetting would seem to do the opposite, to mangle or disfigure our identity by stripping it of its experiences. This is the forgetting of dementia, which Kelsey alludes to in a passage that describes his father’s “unfocused eyes and hanging mouth,” “his memory, his mind” beginning to liquefy. But in the lyrical love story that weaves in and out of Kelsey’s catalogue of lost things, we glimpse another forgetting, the kind that clears the way for its familiar cognate, forgiveness. “Forgive and forget” is another cliché, but, like Kleist’s idea of a consciousness that is either absent or infinite, it points toward the ideal of a second innocence, rigorous in its negation of a bruising past. Such an innocence is not irrational, or pathological, but bold. It does remember, but it does not build a new body from old wounds. It sets us walking down a dark road with only one thing to be sure of: that somewhere the light is on, and someone is looking for us, still. {read}