I saw someone mention that their memory is like a filing system. I don't know how normal that is, but it's not what mine is like, not really.

Imagine you're standing in The Memory Room. There's a table in front of you and three plain walls. The table has a big recycling bin fill with all the crap that makes up my short term memory. There's a woodchipper right beside the table and all the sensory output is pouring into the bin from the ceiling. The bin is unorganized and there's a robot arm on the table next to it that isn't programmed very well. The arm grabs things from the bin at random, infrequently, and throws them into the fourth wall, the non-plain one. This tiny, random and mostly useless hodgepodge of smells, images and feelings are the only things that do not eventually fall into woodchipper oblivion.

The fourth wall isn't a wall so much as it is a swamp. This kind of sludgy, static malaise. The surface ripples as garbage hits it sinks, slowly, inevitably, deeper into the static away from The Memory Room. You can see a lot of things in the swamp from your spot at the table, but the vast bulk of it you need to Summon. There's no sorting system, but in your years working The Memory Room you've learned roughly where things will be if you need them, so it's only ever a few moments of searching before you find them. When you get them, you dredge them up from the depths of the static swamp and pull what you can back onto the table. It'll be a video clip, or an image with some notes stuck to the side or scribbled on the back. Just random information, mostly. A picture of a hotel room somewhere near the east coast. There's a mini fridge full of soda and beer. Something blurry on the TV. Not much else attached to it, some names of people who were there, a weird thing your cousin said, someone had their shirt on in the pool. No information on where you were going or when. That might be in the swamp somewhere, still, but the connection's rotted.

The further those memories sink into the swamp, the more decayed and masticated they get, until you're passing the abyssal zone of the static soup and all you can find are faded images and disconnected emotions.

Sometimes, though, when you pull something up it turns out to be a rat king of half ignored, half forgotten memories all tangled together and they're dredged up all at once, things you never think about. Your mom hit a deer when you were little. Her friend asked if you knew she killed bambie. That friend had a son, you met him once. He was way older than you. You don't think he lived at home anymore. You mostly knew him because of all his old toys they let you play with. There was an electronic dungeons and dragons game that you were way too young to understand let alone beat. You remember your dad said he got arrested. Was there anything weird about him when you met?

Then there's nothing else, just a soggy rat king on the table. You poke at it a bit and decide there's not much there worth dwelling on and chuck the whole thing back into the static soup.

That's what my memory feels like to me, anyway. Not really a filing system. More of a bog. Really messy and kind of unpleasant but that's where all the stuff is. If you need stuff, that's where you've gotta go.

I guess there's a computer against one of the walls with a really well organized file structure not made by me that has all the information like "This is what a car is" and "The floor will creak if you step here" that isn't quite on the table but isn't really in the swamp. So three walls, a table, a bin and chipper, a swamp, a hydraulic fishing line and a business computer.