Take the cilantro, leave the zamboni

Suzie was looking for her beach umbrella when she stumbled across the memory trap, stumbled against it really, in the back of her hall closet.

It was amazing how easy it was to forget where you'd put a memory trap. After all, it wasn't as if that was one of the memories you were trapping; quite the opposite. It very carefully packaged away all of your memories within certain parameters, not making you forget them entirely, but filling them over with a discreet haze, like old footage of suspects' faces in one of those low-def police shows they used to make back in Suzie's dad's time. It took some time to set up the trap, giving it the parameters to block and how hazy to make them, and Suzie had dreaded sitting down to think back over the last weeks of her relationship with Elton. She'd had to think clearly, one last time, about the dinner at their favorite Italo-Ethiopian restaurant in town, the uncomfortable barbecue with friends they'd had on Block Island Peninsula State Park right after their first "I don't think this will work in the long term" discussion, and what turned out to be the last lazy late-morning Saturday sex they'd had, because that evening he had started packing to leave. But it was better than the alternatives, and her doctors had said so after two weeks of no sleep and 6 pounds lost because Suzie couldn't eat, and no improvement over the first day. Better to pack most of it away for now, spend the time setting the machine to tag the painful stuff and fuzz things with similar eidetic signatures, and get some sleep before going back to it.

Most people _did_ go and unblock the memories bit by bit, as time passed. Well, all the people Suzie knew had. She supposed some people did try to keep the boxes buried in their basements year after year, even though everyone knew that eventually the box would fail, leaving a person to abruptly stumble upon memories that were surprisingly fresh, and still very painful, decades later. No, you could do it slowly and gently, and there were even automated settings to ease you back to the memories in tiny little stages, but you had to DO it sooner or later. And Suzie had even set some automated reactivation up when she configured the box, but she supposed now that the rate was too slow, because finding the box certainly hadn't been pleasant.

Of course, it made no difference now that Suzie had abruptly reactivated the little gray box with her elbow by accident. She had managed to elbow the catalog button on the front while grabbing one of the interface contacts with her right hand to steady herself. The small green light on the front left corner of the lid went from flashing once every five seconds, indicating stasis, to turning a little rainbow of colors as its nano-LED awoke with the rest of the box. Even with only one hand on the interface contacts Suzie started to get a flood of events back, and in shock she found she reached out to put her left hand on the other contact, as if that would help her to catch her balance against the flood of memories, even though she knew it would do the opposite. She must have been visualizing her beach umbrella very well, because the catalog interface immediately served up a crisp SuzieVision image of waves and water, the breakers in Huntington Beach where she and Elton had vacationed one summer with Suzie's family. She was standing waist deep in the water, trying to bodysurf these West Coast waves the way she had learned to in Delaware as a kid, and failing miserably because the Pacific Ocean waves seemed to have a physics all their own, slamming her knees into the sand no matter what she did.

Elton, who enjoyed the outdoors but disliked beach sand, was sitting on a deck chair under his RayBann NanoSilver beach umbrella (a frivolous purchase when Suzie already had a perfectly good super UV block umbrella, but that was Elton for you, better living through Chemistry), avoiding the sun and reading yet another nanoelectronics paper. He had sighed and agreed to come to the beach with her, but then made no secret of being uncomfortable and impatient to go home. All this, after she had suggested that they split up for the day, so that he could spend a little quality time with the portable nanomanipulation box he'd brought along, while she played with the sand on her own.

The memory flowed back over Suzie with all the heat of that summer day, making her break into a sweat and murmur as her stomach twisted at the fresh pain. The box continued on, giving Suzie just enough time to realize just how ugly this was going to be, and that Elton had probably been right about them, if he had THAT attitude about vacation planning, before she was back at her belated birthday dinner, the spring before that beach vacation, where everyone was cooing over Tom and Joan's new baby, and Suzie had been smiling down at the rather new titanium commitment ring on her hand as she burped the baby and smelled its sweet hair. Everyone had been talking about their plans for the future, Tom and Joan about their home in a new development that had just gone up in Boston Harbor, and Suzie and Elton about their plans to move to Mare Tranquillitatus Colony for a few years' stint in GeoCorps, doing teaching and habitat building in exchange for some relief from graduate school loans. This brought back a flood of memories of the first days after Elton left, days Suzie spent contacting GeoCorps to deactivate her application and phoning her financial counselor to discuss the changes in her plans, even though he swore she should take a little time to grieve and then deal with the money stuff. Suzie hadn't been able to do anything else; looking at financial spreadsheets was easier, was better, was less painful than replaying all the arguments with Elton over whether it was "worth it" to spend those years with GeoCorps rather than furthering his career as a nanoengineer, wondering if she had been too pushy even though he had originally encouraged her to follow her dream of doing GeoCorps.

The flood of memories continued for what may have been minutes but felt like weeks, and Suzie found herself stuck, standing facing the box on its little wooden shelf, breathing shallow little breaths and feeling quite dizzy. Eventually, the flow of memories slowed, and Suzie found the energy to think the pause command, and pick the box up so she could sit on the floor with it. Now was not the time, oho, very much not the time to go through the contents in detail, but with a heavy, weary mind Suzie bumped up the unblock settings to a higher rate, and then set the trap to sleep again. She wished she could just bury it in the back yard, take it to the beach and throw it into the ocean, go to Tranquillitatus with GeoCorps and shove it out an airlock. But she knew those weren't long term fixes, and that the result would be even more unpleasant. Nonetheless, Suzie was very late to pick up Mei Lin and begin the long drive to the beach, so it couldn't be done now.

Suzie stood up, retrieved the beach umbrella from where it peeped out over rolls of old wrapping paper, and closed the closet door carefully as she left. There was a beach to enjoy, a date to get to know, and a life to live. But before leaving for the beach, Suzie called up the household calendar system and set a repeating reminder to start working through the memory trap a little bit each month. Better safe than sorry, with memories that could still bite that hard.