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Modern Memory
By Juliet Leclerc

aaaae walked into "heaven." That's what he called the technology giant's flagship store. The bright fluorescent light would have overpowered others. They could have caused migraines, but not for him. They lighted up his soul. The many people slumped over the display terminals checking their e-mail was a normal sight for him. He did it himself. Others who weren't regular visitors would find it odd in the same way that it's odd when people read books in bookstore cafes without actually buying the books.
aaaaHe eagerly strolled over to a free terminal and logged into his own webpage. It amused him to see how dumb he could be, constantly updating it with items he had recorded on his own or with his friends. Most recently, he had taken pictures of his own face with his laptop's web camera and, via one of the programs, morphed the picture to look like someone else. A cartoon figure almost. Someone who, upon first glance, didn't look a thing like him, not even after a long, hard look. He enjoyed
aa playing with his computer. It reminded him of the times he sat by himself in front of his TV screen playing Pong and, years later, playing Mario Bros. How could he get to that next level--what were the tricks? His friends had provided some answers but he knew there had to be others. The little mustached man in his overalls was running across a screen that looked sometimes like a land in the sky--jumping from cloud to cloud--sometimes an underground lair, where he tried to avoid pits of fire and spurts of fire that would jump out from nowhere. Ah, and those happy-faced

mushrooms that would make him a giant. If only mushrooms were really like that. As he moved up a new level, he did feel like a giant though--a man of great importance. He had gotten to the next level all on his own.
aaaaHe clicked on the next tab of his homepage and looked at the pictures there, pictures taken on many trips. Very rarely were his pictures serious. He would pose with serious faces for shots that he and his best friend called "the bored serious face" pictures. There was one picture of himself that he thought made him look very handsome. He was in a suit and tie with a big smile. His sisters said he looked like "Vampirino" because his canines seemed a lot more prominent in that picture than they were in real life. He didn't care. He knew he was handsome. How could he not be? He was tall and dark so he had to be handsome too. The three went together, didn't they?
aaaaOr the picture where he was being kissed on the top of his head by his girlfriend. She was standing behind him on a bench. She placed her arms around his neck and he pretended he didn't care that he was being kissed. In reality, he loved the attention she gave him, the way she insisted that they travel and see the world.
aaaaNext to him, a guy had put in a CD and was burning something onto it. The noise evoked the times he had backed up his girlfriend's computer. So much music! Did she really listen to all that music? She did have an awful lot of spoken files too. What was she trying to learn now? Turkish? Why? He wasn't sure. She always said she wanted to know the language of the country she wanted to visit. Did she want to visit Turkey? Why Turkey all of a sudden? Wasn't she just talking about going to Japan? He couldn't understand her sometimes. But it was fun to see what she would do with her computer. She had files full of writing, mostly academic papers she wrote in college. He never kept those types of things. Once the paper was done, that was the end of it. Why save those things? They weren't pictures. They didn't remind him of anything great and wonderful. They just took up memory on her computer--memory that could be used for games and pictures.

aaaaShe typed her thoughts quickly into her laptop. Journals about the most intimate thoughts she had during the day. Or letters she sent to her friends around the world. She took comfort in the speed of communication that the Internet provided but she didn't want to become too attached to it. She still handwrote letters. She believed that a person's heart and soul came through more clearly in script than from a keyboard.
aaaaBut she treasured the keyboard for its ability to capture her thoughts in one place instead of in various books or on pieces of scattered paper organized in some haphazard manner. The computer was organized while she was not.

  aaaaShe enjoyed accessing stories and articles from all over the world. She wanted to know more about why Turkey was having so much trouble joining the European Union. Why a place with so much history and beautiful landmarks she'd only seen in books couldn't be a part of a community of history and landmarks? She needed to go there and see for herself. She searched for travel deals whenever she had a moment. She craved the excitement of being on a plane and flying to a place she would meet for the first time. A place to put down a footprint and that would
remind her of sights and smells that she would recognize for years to come. She enjoyed creating these mental pictures in her head. She didn't need a catalog of them on some technological file sharing space. She could store them in the greatest archive of all: her memory.