Remembering

You know how we never think that a certain set of days are the best days of our life while we're still living them? By time we do think it, it's too late and a little sad - mostly because our days need to get worse before we realise that the best ones are over.

A remarkable thing has been happening, though. I've been doing the living and realising simultaneously. It's come in flashes, in brief bursts of sweet satisfaction. It's been surprising, because I've lived most of my life waiting for the bottom to fall out of things, an ornery concentration of pessimism.

But I'd been in the cab the other day, when it'd occurred to me that this is my primary mode of transport these days, when the boyfriend isn't driving me. There'd been a time when cab fare had felt crushingly unaffordable to me - and they still are, for lots and lots of people in this country. Now, I blithely spend the college education funds of my unborn children on peak hour surcharges and fuel price hikes everywhere I go - because, well, maybe my kid will make like me and get a scholarship. Or something.

I'd been taking the cab to lunch at Raffles Hotel, where there'd be starched linen, succulent dim sum and the company of someone I liked. We'd spend almost two hours laughing uproariously and whispering conspiratorially before calling for more tea.

My biggest concern that day was whether my bag matched my shoes. And I remember thinking, "This is going to be one of the best days of your life".

Today, I had a similar thought. A colleague, noting my fondness for everything Doraemon-related (I know. It's like finding out that Charlie Sheen likes kittens), had given me a plastic Doraemon encased in a whale with wheels on bottom a few months ago. For months, we'd both thought that one simply pushed the whale around to make it go and fancied oneself entertained by the whole thing. But to my delight, I'd found out today that you could wind it up by twisting the Doraemon part around, so that the whole thing would skitter across a surface, all business-like.

And so I found myself at my colleague's cubicle demonstrating how the Doraemon-whale-pod really worked, with plenty of giggling. It struck me then that I was, at 2 in the afternoon, perfectly free to act like a complete idiot in the office and there was someone else willing to do it with me, egged on by a Japanese robot cat from the future.

I didn't think that I would have many more days like this one, to be young and stupid and to be excused for being stupid because I am young - and the important thing had been that I'd had the good sense to realise it then.

The largest superstitions still stand, though. There is a quota on these self-satisfied thoughts, for example, because the one day that you allow yourself to freeze in your mind might become the day from which things begin to go downhill. The universe is cruel, like that. I have many cherished memories of relationships in which the endings have been acrimonious, with nothing but the best memories to taunt me - the ones I'd stupidly saved.

And now, I keep most memories in the working memory part of my mind, the one that you use to hold the most temporary of information, like a phone number you know you will only dial once. I periodically throw out birthday cards because they weigh me down. Whenever I get a stuffed toy gift, I worry about the inevitable trip to the Salvation Army if the relationship were to go south (so far, I've made 4 trips). I scrub out overdue memories diligently - the best ones will hurt you when reality catches up with you and the worst ones just hurt you, I reason.

But some days - just not too many of them - are worth remembering.