This Faculty As Possessed By This Particular Individual

The mind retains more than we realise or acknowledge. Within it there are deep recesses which store all past sensations, thoughts and knowledge, that learned (by eye, by ear, from books) and that experienced (direct mental and physical involvement), and yet the sum of these can never be recalled all at the same time. Some will never be recalled at at all, for we never knew they were retained and no further need has ever arisen for them. Others will rise, unbidden, just the once and then sink again to the depths; some will repeat this motion often, though its repetition will never be the same as the time before or the time before that. A new sensation, a new understanding will appear. The facts, too, (as you perceive them) will appear altered. And what the mind doesn't remember or choose to store, the body might, and bring with it a new level of sensation to memory. Of its own gathered scars it will recollect what the body was like previously and attempt to, if it's part of its destiny, return to its original, perhaps happiest, design; or if age be a barrier draw from the mind what the body then felt like to inhabit. In the mirror traces might be seen of the old face, the old outlines.
The living person will call up their times: those they lived through, the events they experienced, the people they knew, and perhaps still do. They will recall how they were and how others were and compare past to present. 'Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant.' Everything clean forgotten: thoughts and passions demand to be written down, yet in writing may be different to the past you thought you were remembering. Things may not be, in their remembering, any clearer, only different. Writing, with pen or fingers, probes old wounds, and makes work. There's memories and thoughts to sift and sort like seeds, separate into piles. An army of ants, in single file, carry some of these away like treasure.
I have become C.S. Lewis' Orual. His retelling of a myth has taken hold of my mind; has taken my memory as its possession. My realities are fiction, my life passes in dreams. Such images dance before me, filled with ghosts of events and people, some of which happened and some of which didn't. I half inhabit life, I half inhabit dream. I expect magical instances, like those in books, to happen. Destiny needs no effort, no input. The lines have blurred.
My memory tyrannises, my mind plagiarises more accomplished writers' work, and gives their words new twists and turns to convey a different meaning, a different message. One which I or anybody else won't, should I or they chance upon these words at some later date, appreciate, let alone comprehend. There is only one moment, the moment in which something is written. The meaning, the message later will mean something else entirely, or nothing, even.
More time passes in silent speculation, more spectres float before eyes, more words take me to places unvisited and enable me to revisit the old.

Picture credit: Landscape with Psyche Outside the Palace of Cupid, 1664, Claude Lorrain (source: WikiArt). 

Adapted from a journal entry, February 2021. Quote from Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis.