[https://aethermug.com/posts/i-do-not-remember-my-life-and-it-s-fine]

Often my wife mentions an event or the name of a shop, saying something like “I miss the Flavor Savor hamburgers we used to go to when we lived in Nagareyama!” Usually, to her unconcealed dismay, I draw a complete blank: “what’s the Flavor Savor?” We used to go there all the time, she says, and it wasn’t even that long ago.

I get absolutely nothing. I frantically try to think of hamburger joints in Nagareyama: zero hits.

Then she adds some spatial information, like “it’s on the last floor of the XYZ building in front of the station” and suddenly I’m transported there in a roller-coaster instant and it all comes back to me clearly. I almost feel the swooshing movement of going from the station to the entrance of XYZ building, then to the escalators, then up to the last floor, and finally homing into the entrance of the Flavor Savor, all in less than a second. Now all the semantic information pours out: “of course, the Flavor Savor! We went there, like, six times in a year. They have great avocado burgers and a tasty homemade sauce there!” If not too averaged-out, even some fragments of Flavor Savor episodes might come back to me at that point.