Five forgotten

I'm a keeper of memories. I don't (or rarely) throw away mementos from past relationships, surviving childhood trinkets, old birthday cards, even that bottle of sand from a day at the beach with an old admirer. Every object is a part of my memory and a part of me I don't want to lose.

Today I found a small blue pouch containing five small seashells. At first, I couldn't for the life of me remember where the blazes they came from. I poured them out onto my palm, felt tiny, hard coldness on my skin, and looked at them for a second.

I picked up the smallest, its smooth, white chalkiness between my thumb and forefinger.

And suddenly I am back at little Punggol beach, and I am 17 again. I see his 7.30pm silhouette bend down, fishing rod in one hand, the other reaching down to the sand. He straightens up and holds out a round, smooth seashell no bigger than my thumbnail, a dusty white in the greying dusk. He places it, still wet and sandy, in my open palm.

I put that seashell down and prodded the one next to it with my forefinger, also white, but bigger, and slightly pink, and noticed there was another next to it, and they were apparently two halves of the same at some point in the past.

And it is Pasir Ris on my eighteenth birthday. He is excitedly tugging my arm and dragging me through the boardwalk, the surrounding mangrove silent watchers to this humid, stifling teenage date. With his other hand he lugs a bag containing cheap champagne in a chiller and dinner in a styrofoam box. With my free hand, I alternate between slapping at the mosquitoes that are making a meal out of me and pushing the sweat out of my eyes. I say nothing of my discomfort. After all, it's a romantic date. Isn't it? As we hurry along, from my pocket comes clacking sounds of two seashells colliding with each step.

The rough, grey lines of the other one caught my eye next, and I thought it looked like a snail shell. I picked that one up.

He's giving me a little grey shell that looks like a snail shell. He says he thought of me and picked it up at the beach where he was fishing - alone. I don't believe him.

The last one was a purple and white fragment of a larger shell piece. I ran my fingertip over its rough, uneven surface. I held it up, the last memory from the little blue pouch.

And try as I might, I could not remember where this one was from.