Every month a man arrives in my town and sells us our most precious memories

He comes without warning at exactly 2:38 am in the dead of night on the thirtieth of every month (I know this because I’ve stayed up and waited for him). He walks slowly along our neighborhood streets with a small briefcase in his left hand and an old wooden cane in his right. Despite his slow pace, his stride is so long that it only takes him maybe 15 minutes to walk down every street twice and return to where he starts. <br><br>He doesn’t knock on the door, and he doesn’t ring the doorbell. He just calmly sets the briefcase on the ground, stands on the stoop, and hums a gentle melody that drifts inside through the windows. Sometimes I imagine it a lilting waltz, the kind you’d dance with your true love at your wedding. Other times it’s an melancholy dirge; an ode to a time that we can’t go back to and people we can’t see again.<br><br>Either way, it always fills my heart with a longing so strong it makes me want to cry. I never do, though, because I never stop watching him. I’m transfixed as I stand at the window and gaze out into the moonlit night, watching him stand under the streetlight at the end of the walk. <br><br>As I said, I’ve been staying up to watch him for months, but I’d guess he’s been selling us our memories for his entire life. I say this because he’s a very old man whose thinned grey hair is combed over the top of his head and whose eyes are cloudy with cataracts. He’s tall, though, despite evident signs of osteoporosis in his posture, and most nights he doesn’t need to use his cane. He leans on it only as a habit developed over decades, and even that habit is only broken now and then when the wind is particularly strong and catches him off guard, blowing him off balance. The wind blows most nights in my town. This isn’t a coincidence.<br><br>I have no idea where he came from, or how he even got here. I’ve never seen him drive a car or walk up the road, though the closest city is many miles away. I think he probably just appears, same as the wind; a natural phenomenon spawned by the very nature of our town. Some would say he’s the devil, while others may think of him as an angel. He’s probably neither, which is what scares me the most.<br><br>He’s not the first of his kind, I’ve discovered. There have been others before; some female, some male. Some may even call them spirits, or shadow people. They may have different styles and approaches, but they all perform the same function, all over the world. They’re a natural part of life, like the passing of time and the movement of the planets through space. <br><br>So why don’t we notice them? Why do we never even talk about them? Because we’ve made a deal with them, or our ancestors have. We can’t remember it, because it’s a memory that we’ve purchased and then forgotten, but we’ve all agreed to never try and stop them. We know that we need them, even if we don’t quite understand why. <br><br>Every month, the man arrives and sells us our most precious memories. We pay him with our dreams, which is why we’ve never achieved anything truly great in my town. None of us have ever become truly exceptional at anything or accomplished anything that the rest of the world has never seen before. <br><br>Our dreams may not be real, but we need them. They’re what we live for, and they give our lives meaning. We need meaning, even if it’s only an illusion. But we also need to remember. We need to remember our children being born, getting married, and graduating college. We need to remember first kisses, sex, and falling in love. We need to remember where we grew up, the house we lived in, and what it smelled like when we walked in the front door. <br><br>Our memories make us who we are. Without them, we’d have no past, and no identity. We wouldn’t know who our families are, and we wouldn’t remember how to read, write, or add and subtract. Only with memories can we grow wiser, adapt to changing circumstances, work together as a society, and learn from our mistakes. <br><br>In exchange for the ability to remember, we give up the ability to dream. My entire town is composed of sleep walkers. All of us are zombie-like drones who stumble through our daily lives with no hope of a better future. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, we all secretly wish that our lives would end as quickly and painlessly as possible. We’ve worked for decades, but none of us have ever saved up enough for retirement. We know that it’s impossible, and we know we’ll never stop working, so we don’t even try. <br><br>We know what’s in store for us. We’ve all been there before. Once our organs start to fail and medical science can do nothing more for us, we’re carted off to a large nursing home in the middle of a field. There we’re fed through tubes, changed by professionals, and put to work in every manner imaginable. Every waking moment we watch television, sew, do jigsaw puzzles, read books, paint, play cards, and garden. We work tirelessly to fill our days with activities, and we never stop trying to stay busy. <br><br>We know that if we stop—or even slow down—the man will come for us, and we’ll have nothing left to pay him with. We’ve already given up our dreams, so if we run out of memories, we will have nothing to live for. That’s why none of us ever try to stop the man. Many years ago some of us did, but they’ve long since passed away. <br><br>We realize that the man is necessary; a sacrifice we must make if we want to keep our memories. We even need him now more than ever, as our physical bodies are starting to fall apart. We need to remember who we are, who we used to be, and who we want to be. We need to remember our pasts, our presents, and our futures. <br><br>We need to remember our children, our parents, our wives, and our husbands. We need to remember our pets, houses, cities, schools, and favorite foods. Many of us remember bushy, curly-haired Ronald Reagan, athletic Bill Clinton, kindly Barack Obama, and kinder still Joe Biden. Some of us older ones even remember bushy-haired Ronald Reagan when he was a movie star. Whether we like it or not, our memories are who we are, and we would do anything to keep them. <br><br>Normally, we never run out of memories. Or at least, we didn’t. Not until a few months ago. Not until a few months ago, when the man started raising his prices.<br><br>The man used to only take one dream per memory. That is, he’d only take one dream per month, because we only got one memory per month. Then, a few months ago, he started taking two dreams for every memory. This meant that he was raising the costs exponentially. Every month, we had less and less to pay him with. Then, last month, he started taking three dreams for every memory. <br><br>I don’t think he’ll continue to sell us memories for much longer. It’s becoming too expensive, and he knows it. There are only so many dreams we have to give, and soon we’ll run out. <br><br>Normally we shouldn’t be able to remember this much about him, but I’ve discovered a way to outsmart him. Last month, I didn’t buy a memory. I saved my dreams instead, and I’ve never felt more alive. I’m tired all the time now, but I’m actually happy. I have something to hope for again; something to look forward to. This is an immeasurably wonderful feeling, and I recommend it to everyone. <br><br>A few nights ago, I woke up to the sound of dogs barking, and when I looked out my window, I saw a group of people from town chasing after the man. They were neighborhood watch members and other self-appointed vigilantes. I recognized some of them as those who had tried to stop the man before but had failed. It didn’t matter this time, though. The man didn’t even glance back at them, and I’m not sure he even heard them. He just continued to walk his usual rounds, humming a jaunty tune that I didn’t recognize. <br><br>The group followed him all the way out of our neighborhood and into the nearby woods, and I was sure they had finally caught him. I was wrong, however, and when he returned a few hours later for the second round of houses, he was alone. I imagine that the group had given up after tiring themselves out chasing him. The man had obviously spent his entire life walking, and probably had enormous endurance. <br><br>I don’t know what had set them off, but I think I do. I think he’d done something to the mayor in exchange for a bribe. It makes sense if you know the man. You see, he doesn’t just steal our memories. He also changes them. Sometimes we forget things we shouldn’t, and sometimes we remember things that never happened. Sometimes he even changes the way things happened, or the order they happened in, but only if he thinks it will result in a valuable memory that we may one day want to buy back. That’s why we can’t rely on our recollections alone; we need to keep records of important events if we want to remember them correctly. <br><br>So why do we put up with this? Why do we give up our dreams every month for something that may be false?