The Signal Remembers Wrong

The tape has been played too many times and now it dreams. A face arrives in the wrong order, the smile before the eyes, the eyes before the room they were in. Color tears loose from its object and drifts a half-second left. Somewhere in the dropout a second version of the evening insists it also happened, that the door was blue, that no one left early, that the song did not end. Memory is not storage. Memory is a signal degrading gracefully toward a story it prefers. Play it again. It will be a little more beautiful and a little less true.