Where do they all go?

… The Island of lost words — This and That Continued. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I don’t speak much French, but I know enough to translate la petite mort as ‘orgasm’. It’s a shame that it can’t be used to depict each of these forgetting moments. Little deaths. Tip of the tongue. Oh, I nearly had it. Each one a petite mort. All the lost words: like the lost boys in Peter Pan, locked out of their homes, left behind in a store, who become Peter Pan’s guards of honour, who live together in Never Land. Elizabeth Taylor, last Friday morning, the blue velvet dress, lees, Honda Civic, William James; some of them are recalled by you or another around the table. But the ones that never reach beyond your own boundaries surely become another lost boy. Forgotten, accumulated, denied importance, laughed out of the conversation. More lost boys to lead their own lives.

I am no longer as quick on the trigger of memory as I used to be — can see the face, just can't recall the name — but oddly, when writing, I seem to have no problem remembering things.