While I've always had a fondness for my English language classes in school growing up, for about as long, I've always had a disdain for history. To a lot of people I know, this seemed weird, due to the common understanding that English and history always go hand in hand with each other, not at all separate, and you never just bring up one without bringing up the other.

It's almost the same way I am with another well-suited pair of compatible subjects, math and science. The former is one for which I've always had a handy knack and deep love – though we've had our spats here and there – and the latter is one that when left up to me, I'm not too keen on further pursuing.

I may not have been the biggest fan of history – and I'm still not – but I've always been intrigued by the very vehicle that drives history itself forward: memory.

For those that have known me for a while, they have gotten a direct account of what I can always seem to remember while they themselves can't. They always keep asking, "You remember that?" or most commonly telling me, "I can't even remember what I had for breakfast this morning!"

These bits of information I can remember used to seem like just that: tiny info-bits that I just so happened to pick up and that lingered around in my brain for weeks, months, even years to come.

Again, History as a subject still isn't all that appealing to me, but of course with some exceptions in regards to interesting info-bits – about our country or any other. However, when I think back to how the Greeks used to remember all the tiniest details within their epics – all the epithets, the certain sounds within the Greek language, the hell-as-long cataloguing of ships and warriors – several years, possibly even centuries-worth of material that was recited over and over long before any of them wrote any of this down, and then compare it all to how we don't even know what we did just last week, both instances to me seem to have come from alternate universes.

So, while I do feel a bit more special in how I seem to recall the things that others don't feel obligated to recall, I'm not perfect: I'm not the Greeks, not by a long shot. And even at home, there are times when my short-memory pulls a Dory and loses itself, but only for a few minutes.

The long-term cannot survive without the short-term.

That's why to some extent, I've been keen on trying to keep my own history from slipping away: adding to it, preserving it, even reliving it to some degree, and never allowing it from being forgotten, no matter how many reminders it would take.

Sure, I might sound like Gatsby, hopeless in trying to preserve something long-gone: "Can't repeat the past? Why, of course you can!" to only then be blown into the water. That might be why it's one of my favorite books of all time: in some way, I get what Gatsby was trying to do, and maybe I get what the Greeks were trying to do, too.

I've always felt different from those around me, and this is just another notch in the belt of uniqueness I wear – possibly like the belt of Pallas, about whom Aeneas never forgot when he sees the belt on Turnus and ultimately kills him to avenge the young Pallas's untimely death... But nowadays, sooner or later, holding onto a memory – or the ghost of a memory or its feeling – either staying in the past or fading out in the future, will keep you from being in the present.

So, while my peers freely move forward, I too will march but with my memories of us all in tow.