The Archivist
They call me monster because I collect memories. But what they don't understand is that I'm saving them. Every time someone forgets their first love's laugh, when they can't recall their mother's hands, when the name of their childhood best friend slips away like water through fingers—I catch those memories. I preserve them. I keep them safe in glass jars lined with velvet, where they can never fade, never distort, never die. The woman whose wedding day I took? She was crying. Not from joy—those tears were grief. Her marriage would have ended in three years, three months, seventeen days. I know because I have the memory of her future self, the one who would have wasted decades trying to forget his fists. I saved her from that. I saved her from herself. The child whose birthday party I erased? He would have grown up to be a man who remembers that day as the last time his father was sober. Now he has the gift of not knowing what he lost. He gets to be happy in his ignorance. I gave him that gift. They scream when they see me coming with my empty jars. They call me thief, parasite, nightmare. But I'm the only one who understands: memories are poison. They rot you from the inside out. They make you miss what you can never have again. They turn you into a ghost haunting your own life. I am not stealing. I am curing them. Every empty space where a memory used to live is a small mercy. Every forgotten trauma is a kindness. Every erased heartbreak is liberation. I am not the villain of this story. I am the only one brave enough to save people from themselves. And when they finally catch me—and they will catch me—I will have one last jar ready. Not for their memories, but for mine. So I can forget that I was ever the only person who cared enough to help them forget. The empty jars are not trophies. They are tombstones for every moment that would have destroyed them. The Archivist runs their finger along the shelf of empty jars, each one labeled with a name and a date that no longer exists in anyone's mind but theirs.
⊶ FrankSx Jan 2026