A City Where Memories Can Be Bought and Sold #BlogchatterHalfMarathon @Blogchatter

I wake up in a city
that smells of yesterday.
Not like nostalgia,
but like currency —
minted in the quiet hum of the neural bazaar,
where people trade laughter like shares
and bottle the ache of childhood
for those who can afford
to feel something genuine for a moment.

This city —
its skyline stitched with wires and whispering screens —
is built on recollection.
Memory is not sacred here,
it’s an economy.
A system.
A pulse that keeps the neon gods alive.

I walk through streets that shimmer with thought-residue,
shards of dreams,
half-forgotten lullabies leaking
from someone’s overplayed memory loop.
Vendors call out like prophets —
“First kisses! Cheap today!”
“Mother’s voice, vintage edition!”
“Regret-free college days, one gigabyte for a fiver!”

And I,
fool that I am,
a poet, perhaps still believing
in the sanctity of my own pain,
clutch my head like it’s a temple
that someone has begun to dismantle
brick by brick.

Because last night,
someone stole my memories.
Not all — just the ones that mattered.
The ones that made me me.
—
It started with a flicker,
a momentary blank
where your face used to be.
A void shaped like a smile
I once trusted.
And when I tried to summon it,
I found nothing but static.
A white noise grief
that hummed through my veins.

I went to the Bureau of Cognitive Recovery —
a cold building lined with glass tanks
where people sat, their minds
plugged into shimmering pools of borrowed lives.
The clerk behind the counter —
half-human, half-software —
looked at me with eyes that reflected data streams.
“What have you lost?” they asked,
as if loss could be listed.

“My memories,” I whispered,
“or maybe just the parts that remember
how to feel like myself.”

The clerk nodded like a machine
processing a familiar complaint.
“Do you have a receipt?”

And that’s when it hit me —
in this city, even remembrance
requires proof of purchase.
—
I remember when memories were free.
When they came uninvited —
like the smell of rain,
like the sound of someone humming in the kitchen.
You didn’t need to log them or label them,
you just lived.

But then came the architects of recall,
the neuroscientists turned merchants
who realized nostalgia
was more addictive than any drug.
Soon, every street corner
had a Memory Exchange booth.
People lining up to sell
their unwanted heartbreaks,
their traumas,
their quiet winter nights
that once meant everything but now just hurt too much.

And the buyers — oh, the buyers —
they came in droves,
looking for lives more vivid than their own,
buying moments like postcards
from a past they never lived.

The city fed on this.
It grew.
It glittered with counterfeit emotions,
with secondhand sorrow,
with synthetic joy.
—
And I,
who thought I could stay clean,
once bought a memory too.
Just to see what it felt like.

It was called “The Morning You Said Goodbye.”
A best-seller that month —
someone else’s heartbreak
repurposed for art.

I felt it —
the tremble in the voice,
the crack of dawn against a damp pillow,
the hollow space between two names
that once meant everything to each other.

It was exquisite.
Pain in 4K resolution.
Almost better than real.
Almost.

But real pain doesn’t fade cleanly.
It leaves stains.
This one didn’t.
And that’s when I knew —
what they sell here
isn’t memory.
It’s mimicry.
—
So I lived quietly,
guarding my mind like a fortress.
Until yesterday.

When I tried to remember
the scent of my mother’s hands,
the rhythm of her lullabies —
gone.
When I tried to recall
the way the sea once made me feel infinite —
gone.
When I tried to write about you —
the ink refused to flow.

I searched my mental archives,
but someone had walked in
and taken the most private parts
of my soul.

And now I am accused
of stealing someone else’s.
—
They say a poet broke into the Data Vault,
rewrote another man’s memories as his own.
They say he uploaded emotions
that didn’t belong to him,
spoke in a voice that wasn’t his.
They say he used someone else’s pain
to write his poems.

They say I am that poet.

I laughed at first.
Because isn’t that what art has always been?
Borrowing fragments of human feeling
and making something new?
But here, it’s a crime.
Here, inspiration is theft.
Here, empathy has a price tag.
—
I remember —
no, I used to remember —
walking with her by the sea,
the waves reciting our names
in secret syllables of foam.
Now it’s just a story I’ve bought
from the Archive of Common Dreams.
I can’t tell if it ever happened.

Did I really hold her hand that night?
Did I really promise forever,
or was that just a script
downloaded for romantic authenticity?
In this city, even love
can be a simulation.
—
There are black markets too —
the underground stalls of forgotten truth.
Places where hackers
trade raw, unfiltered memory streams
without government moderation.
They say the stolen ones taste realer.
They burn sharper,
like the first breath after drowning.

I went there once,
disguised in anonymity,
to search for mine.
Rows of stolen thoughts flickered
across digital altars.
Someone was selling
“Childhood under mango trees.”
Someone else offered
“Last conversation before the accident.”
I scrolled, trembling,
until I found it —
“Boy on a rooftop, writing letters to the moon.”

My heart stopped.
That was mine.
The earliest one.
The first dream I ever kept.

I paid the broker everything I had —
credits, coins, even my capacity to dream
for one more night.
He uploaded it into me
with a sterile smile.

And as it flooded back,
I saw the rooftop,
the wind,
the paper trembling with unsent words.
For a second, I felt whole again.

Then the lights glitched.
And I realized —
it was a reconstruction.
A re-creation.
Someone else’s version of my own life.
Close enough to fool the heart,
but not the soul.
—
I wandered the city afterward,
haunted by echoes that weren’t fully mine.
Every streetlight blinked
in Morse code guilt.
Every passerby’s eyes
seemed to hold a trace of what I’d lost.

A little girl hummed a tune
I could almost remember —
a tune my mother once sang.
Or maybe hers.
Or maybe nobody’s.
Does it matter anymore?
—
They arrested me this morning.
Said the algorithm traced
a memory theft to my ID.
Said I took from someone
the same fragments I claimed were mine.
Said my testimony was inconsistent
with the database version of my own life.

How do you defend yourself
when your own memories
are unreliable witnesses?

They interrogated me
in a white room with no shadows.
Asked what year I was born,
what my first heartbreak felt like,
who taught me how to write.

I said — I don’t know anymore.
The data might.
But I — the living residue,
the conscious aftertaste —
am no longer sure.
—
They told me they’d restore my memories
if I confessed.
But how do you confess
to something you can’t remember committing?
I might have stolen it,
or maybe it was stolen from me.
Maybe both are true.
Maybe that’s the point.

Because in this city,
possession is the only proof of existence.
If someone else owns your memory,
they own your identity too.

And so I sit here,
half-erased,
half-remembered,
wondering if I am even the same person
who began this story.
—
Sometimes, I dream —
of a time before the trading began.
Before the city learned
how to bottle memory like perfume.
I dream of living raw.
Of losing things naturally —
a heartbreak, a summer, a friend —
and letting them dissolve into time
instead of data.

I dream of pain that doesn’t need
a refund policy.
Of joy that doesn’t expire.
Of forgetting as an act of mercy,
not malfunction.
—
Once, a philosopher said,
“To remember is to live twice.”
But here, to remember
is to owe something.

And I wonder —
if they can steal my memories,
can they steal the meaning too?
Or does that still belong to me?

Because meaning
isn’t stored in neurons or files.
It’s in the tremor that runs through you
when you realize what’s gone.
It’s in the ache that technology can’t anesthetize.
It’s in the silence that follows
when the machine says,
“Memory not found.”
—
Maybe I’ll be erased tomorrow.
Maybe my memories will be auctioned
to collectors of poetic tragedies.
Maybe someone will buy this exact story
and live it as their own —
walk these same corridors,
mourn these same losses,
write this same poem.

Maybe that’s how immortality works now.
Not through remembrance,
but replication.
—
Still, before they take the rest,
let me say this —

If you ever walk through this city
and see a flicker of a boy
on a rooftop,
writing to the moon,
know that was once me.
If you hear a mother’s lullaby
hidden in the hum of neon lights,
that was once my world.
If you find a poem titled
“The Weight of Unremembering,”
written in trembling digital ink,
that was once my truth.

And if you find someone
accused of stealing memories —
look closer.
Sometimes, the thief
is only trying to return
what was taken first.
—
So I sit here now,
between what was and what’s been rewritten,
wondering if identity
is anything more than the sum of remembered moments.
Maybe I’m just a patchwork —
some real, some borrowed,
some never mine.

But when I close my eyes,
I can still feel — faintly —
the warmth of a hand
I may or may not have held.
And that,
even in this city of counterfeit dreams,
still feels like truth.
—
For truth, you see,
cannot be traded.
It lingers —
in gaps between circuits,
in breaths between words,
in the ache of something
you can’t quite recall
but know was beautiful.

And as long as I can feel that ache,
I am still here.
Half-forgotten, perhaps.
But real.

Real enough to remember
what remembering once meant.

This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon