This is the dumbest story from my life. Maybe that’s not the right word for
it. Silly, I suppose. It’s certainly not the kind of thing a person should
be thinking about as they’re on the brink of death. A normal person
wouldn’t, anyway. I was known in my day as someone with an excellent memory.
I didn’t have any supernatural ability, or even a diagnosable condition,
like hyperthymesia or an eidetic memory, but I was good. In particular, I
never forgot a name, and I never forgot a face. So it was a little jarring
when a random woman came up to me in the bread aisle of the grocery store,
acting like we were old pals. As she started talking, I was thinking that
maybe she was mistaking me for someone else. I hear that sort of thing
happens to other people. But while the things she was talking about didn’t
make any sense, she used enough keywords for me to think that maybe we did
know each other somehow, and I started questioning my confidence in my
amazing mental faculties. Maybe I forgot people and things all the time, but
they never came up again, so I never had the chance to even realize it.
Perhaps this woman was tapping into a weakness that I was too blind to see I
had at all. Was she a witch? A god? Was she still talking? I couldn’t
understand most of what she was saying, her lips were moving so fast. She
didn’t have an accent from my perspective, and she wasn’t mumbling, it was
just too fast. I wished I had a little remote that would let me slow her
down. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought I would probably
just mute her, or turn her off. I didn’t need to talk to this person, except
maybe I did, because she knew me, and I needed to know how! Yes, I had a cat
when I was a child. No, his name wasn’t Mittens, it was Buttons. My first
car? I made one up, because I don’t drive.
I keep trying to listen to her, but then I really did get bored of the
“conversation” and wished that I could simply walk away. If I were anywhere
else, I might have been able to, but I had this cart full of food. She would
probably follow me, and skip the milk this week just so she wouldn’t have to
end our little one-sided chat. Of course, I could have left my cart, and
proceeded right to the exit, but that would have looked so weird, and again,
what if she really did know me, and she tracked me down, and tried to spark
a friendship? What was that about my mother’s maiden name? I still
couldn’t—oh my God, she’s a scam artist. This woman was trying to get my
bank information to steal my identity. Keep in mind that this was in the
early days of the internet, so people were still mining for information in
the real world. It was still bizarre. Joke’s on her, because of my great
memory, all of my security answers were fake. I don’t find it any more
difficult to recall a food that isn’t my favorite than one that is. It’s
tomatoes, by the way, but I told her pizza, because that’s a normal answer.
Then I just keep leading her on with her stupid little questions. I met my
spouse in a city I had never been too, and also, I’m not married. The name
of my first celebrity crush is an actor that I hate. My astrological sign?
Really? I’ve never even seen that question before, and I would never use it,
because it’s too easy to find out. I don’t even bother lying to her about
that one. She went through so many questions, finding clever ways to
sprinkle them in, I was almost impressed. Once she was satisfied, she
claimed she had to get going, and we parted ways. It wasn’t until I tried to
pay that I discovered my wallet missing. I realized that she wasn’t only
probing for security answers. She was also distracting me from a pickpocket.
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