He still held the residues of a past. He held them tightly clenched within his hands, thinking that the act of holding what little was left, protecting it, keeping it safe from everything, became the only way he could remember it. Sense memory, he read the term from somewhere. The way we remember things without knowing how, like the grating of fingerprints onto the old pages of older books. It meant that somewhere lingering in our minds was another life being lived simultaneously, without us ever knowing it. A person could live on sense memory alone.
For him, feeling each single grain and the roughness against his palm, dry against dry, became a sense memory. It had become a way of moving between the tenses - past present tense. Not like how they used to teach it in school.
But then, he was always terrible with grammar.
