"Step away from the internet," said J. He could see the steam coming out of my ears. "Take a deep breath."

He could tell that something was getting to me more than it should. By the way I was hacking away at the keys on my keyboard, perhaps, louder and louder as I got deeper into each sentence, turning red in the face, huffing out air.

"Let it go."

He's right. I lifted my hands from the keys in surrender position. I would let it go.

Just as soon as I hit "publish."

* * *

It was a photograph I had taken when I was sixteen or seventeen. A photograph from a series of black-and-white portraits I'd taken with my mom's old Canon AE-1. One of a student teacher in our art class, the water tower that once lived in the center of our town barely visible behind him, already fading from view. One of my grandmother at the end of our lane. One of a long-haired girl in overalls leaning against a tall dark-haired guy called Oliver, who I always thought was a bit mysterious. And this one, a portrait of a friend on a porch swing, knees up and smoking a cigarette, his hair in his eyes.

And there it was on Facebook, number 4 out of 5 in an album of pictures posted by someone I'd never even met before.

I had used these last two photographs in an end-of-the-year high school art show, and so I assumed that maybe this guy had gone to the art show, seen a photo of a friend of his, and taken a photo of my photo. Or some other equally logical explanation.

In the hopes of shedding some light on the situation, I sent him a message asking him how he came across that old photograph of mine. And waited. And then, half an hour later, a response:

Hmm, no I took that. I was doing a B&W photography project at the time. I have several from that week... ???

And I felt as if I'd been hit over the head with a sack of flour.

We had a brief back-and-forth conversation, trying to determine if we might have been standing next to each other when we took the picture, if maybe I knew him and we shared a roll of film. Or doubles. Or something.

But I couldn't shake that odd feeling. The sensation I felt after I'd read his response was one of complete doubt in everything I've ever known, everything I've ever remembered, or written, or believed. And the questions poured into my brain: How can we trust our own memories? Who owns an image? Do we own it if we've owned it for fifteen years in our own memories? How do we know for sure it was ours in the first place? Even when the style is consistent with yours, has the watermark of your eye, your tone, your storytelling with the lens, how do we authenticate the origin of a simple snapshot taken of a friend on a porch swing?

Worse: When we surround ourselves constantly with the comfort of memories, when we define ourselves through them, what does it mean when these memories are challenged?

I'm living in self-doubt for the moment. I'm entirely convinced that I took the picture, and at the same time, trying to remain open to the fact that I could be wrong. What is most difficult is that it's one of my favorite portraits I've ever taken. I remember being disappointed that he was slightly out of focus, the return of the porch swing a bit too fast for my shutter, but I decided that the composition was too perfect, my emotion in it too real for it to be tossed away into the back of a drawer. I loved that photograph. And suddenly I'm being told that it was never mine to love in the first place.

Almost as if I was never there.

What that must feel like.

A few months ago, I put the feelers out to see if anyone had better access to my memory than I do. Reach inside my head! Try to see what I'm seeing since I in no way have the means to describe to you what's in there! I like to be challenging.

I was trying to remember a series of fantasy books I'd read when I was younger; the problem was that I couldn't remember anything concrete about them, but I had a fading image of the cover in my head.

Several of you came up with ideas, but nothing struck the right chord. I sent my childhood best friend a note to see if she could remember. She came up with the Xanth series, but that didn't feel quite right either. Yesterday she left a note on my Facebook wall asking if I'd ever figured it out, saying that it's been killing her too. Her older sister Sally then piped in to ask what we were trying to think of, so I replied with the description.

And Sally, bless her well-preserved memory, came up with Robert Asprin's Another Fine Myth. And, wouldn't you know it, when I clicked on her link and saw that cover, it was like the image in my mind came tumbling out onto the page.

As disturbing as it would be to have a Until the End of the World-style mind recorder*, I sometimes wish we had some way of digitally preserving our very thoughts. The ability to use a search engine to search your brain for the name of the babysitter you had when you were seven, the outfit you wore on your last day of high school**, the script of everything he said to you that night you watched the sun rise over Trafalgar Square. Then again, if we could do that, we'd certainly lose the thrill of throwing out the little scraps of memory we have left, piecing them together with the scraps others have held onto, and discovering what a fine quilt it makes.

(I guess I owe Sally that pewter unicorn.)

*A film whose screenplay, I've only just discovered, was co-written Peter Carey, Booker Prize-winning author of True History of the Kelly Gang, Theft, and Oscar and Lucinda. What interesting paths this train of thought has carved.
**This I actually do remember: The Clash/London Calling t-shirt, moss green corduroy cut-off shorts, black combat boots.

Tell me something that happened. Use the names of people you’d forgotten about, and say what you’d thought would happen but didn’t. Write down what part of the song was playing when you slammed the door only to realize you had to go back inside for your car keys. Can you remember when you were still little enough to hide under the kitchen sink where it smelled like ammonia and Comet and old sponges? What was the color of the clunky old car your Dad would let you help steer. What brand did he smoke?
- Merlin Mann

It would have been so easy to "heart" this quote on Tumblr, then walk away. Which is what I did at first. But it wasn't enough: this experience of storytelling - this is exactly why I write (and read) online.

The same sentiment was echoed in the "60 Minutes" special we watched last night, a memorial for the show's creator, Don Hewitt. Don's mantra was "four words: tell me a story." Because that's all that matters. Merlin is right. Don was right. That's all that matters. Most art is born out of this need to share stories, share portions of our lives meaningful enough to come back to us every time we sit down in front of a keyboard (or easel, or piano) and try to form words (or lines, or chords).

The "clackity noise," as Merlin calls it, is what brings these things out. All of it. Sitting down, and typing. In small little puffs of air: the tiger's eye color of a Goody barrette pulling back your babysitter's hair as she sits motionless in front of the television (shhh "General Hospital"'s on), the sound of the air conditioner in the Dodge van being turned on Maximum High as you kick your Dr. Scholl's off and under the seat, the smell of the grass and dirt and boy that mingled together late one night and lingered long enough for you to mark it down in your journal in a scrawl so frantic you could barely read it years later, punctuated by row after row of swooning hearts and giddy stars. Or huge great marathons of memory, sense, and time, an entire house reconstructed on the page, when you don't want to stop for a second in case it all might fly away - boards, nails, chimney, curtains, attic, and all - into the ether.

Keep typing. Tell me a story. It's what we're here for.

When I heard the news, I sat at my desk listening to OMD and getting teary. Embarrassing. This is far worse than Michael Jackson, I thought. Then I went home and watched selected scenes from Uncle Buck.

We were pre-teens when most of his stuff came out, and so I'd be lying if I said that those films were my life. But they were still ours. We watched them in our friends' dens on VHS, devouring them at slumber parties, reciting lines the next Monday at school. They were our Bibles of Teendom. They gave us something to look forward to. The days we'd spend playing hooky, the parties we'd crash thrown by the popular kids. (When I was 13, I thought that all high school parties would be that crowded, that there would be many, many girls smoking and wearing porkpie hats.)

The school dances and the boys with cars and even detention where we'd dance with the jocks, and the smokers, and the preppies, and the nerds. Working in a record shop with a woman who dressed like Cindy Lauper.

We imagined that everything would be perfect, that we'd all have our happy high school ending, soundtracked by the best British bands. But sometimes the script changes.

Andie and Duckie enter the ballroom. Blane goes over to shake Duckie's hand. Andie says he doesn't need to apologize to her. She and Duckie step onto the dance floor. They both admit that they cannot dance, but they begin to anyway. They don't care what anyone else thinks of them.

John Hughes gave us a lifetime of angst and heartbreak to look forward to.

It was amazing, John.

She picked up a book and brought it over to me, warning that there was a page in there she didn't like. I turned the pages slowly. "I know this one." I remembered that this was the same book that had a certain page I hadn't liked much either when I was her age. Her mother promised us we could skip that page.

"Your nostalgia is her present," Jim said. And I nearly died from the thought.