helium balloons

ss: Amnesia

a combination of a 5sos song fic and greek myth. what more could you ask for?

He was the son of Mnemosyne. And like the Greek goddess of memory, he could remember everything.

And most of the time this was fine. He didn't mind automatically matching a new face with a new name and he was totally okay with photocopying textbook to brain and being horrendously over prepared for any pop quiz his teachers might spring. It was weird being able to directly quote every single movie he had ever watched and weirder still to be able to recall what he had for breakfast six Mondays ago. But he didn't mind this. This was fine.

He could tell you pi up to the 50th digit in three heartbeats and the next thousand in ten minutes. He remembered how many ceiling tiles were on top of the science classroom because he counted them that one time he was bored. He never had to ring his cellphone to find it under the cushions of a sofa and his car keys were always exactly where he left them. It was painfully obvious what date to ink across the top of his homework and it seemed so superfluous to take the time to enter anybody's phone number into his contacts. And he took pride in all of this.

Sure, he didn't mind knowing whose birthday is when and how many seconds are in a year and what the average rainfall was in Ecuador over the past century. But sometimes he wondered how he could store so much in his brain without fail. And while he thought that being a walking, talking super computer was something extraordinary he sometimes wished that his storage space was not so unlimited.

Because he certainly wouldn't mind deleting all those times where his fly was undone or there was toilet paper sticking to the bottom of his shoe. He wouldn't mind forgetting the occurrences where he had fumbled over his words or tripped up the stairs in public. It would be awesome if those moments of laughing too long at a joke or waving back at someone who wasn't waving at him dissipated from memory.

He could remember everything, whether he liked it or not. And most of the time he liked it. Most of the time it was fine. It was only mildly crippling to his self-esteem to remember all of his social foibles, but it was uplifting to think that he was the only one to remember these things. He was the only one to remember everything.

But there was one thing that he wished to forget. One thing that he wished to permanently erase from his mind. One thing that was the easiest to surface into his consciousness: her.

Because how could he forget the way her kisses tasted like ambrosia and how her lips were his Achilles's heel? It was impossible to disremember how her hair flowed like golden ichor. Her skin radiated with the glow of Apollo and her smile rivaled the brilliance of Artemis. She had a face that could launch a thousand ships. He could trace the curvature of her spine with his fingertips and carve her figure into stone like Pygmalion if he wanted. She was graced with Aphrodite's blessing and he was burdened by Aphrodite's curse.

And once he recalled all of this, he only continued to further drown in his memory. He couldn't forget these stupid, little things. Like the way star-speckled Uranus covered the two them when he fell asleep next to her. Or how she twirled into his arms like she had winged feet whenever they danced. How could he tune out the replay of her echoic laughter? How could he forget the way the earth trembled when they kissed? How could he forget the Zeus-like shivers of electricity that pulsed in his veins whenever she was near? Eros's arrow had long since pierced his heart and the scar would never heal.

She was his Siren song and he was a sailor lost at sea. She was a labyrinth and he was trapped somewhere in the twists in turns. He had never tried to figure a way out. He was Icarus and she was the sun. She had melted him, and now he was freefalling through memory, groping for something intangible. She had slipped away and left him behind to remember all this. He could never escape the memories. He could never forget her. If only he could wake up with amnesia.

He remembered everything and he knew he was not fine at all.