“Why document this, as if forgetting were the worst thing?”
                -Annie Liu, from “The Story,” Border Vista
“and what happens next / I don’t remember yet.”
                -Annie Liu, from “Memory in a Foreign Language,” Border Vista

                I usually inhabit a kind of productive logic in which everything is supposed to have its use. Year by year, we’re supposed to be smarter. More capable. Or to put it another way, I was watching The Great British Bake Off, and the contestants were talking about how you had to multi-task and schedule out every minute— while this is mixing, that is setting; while that cooks, this cools. I got excited about all that careful attention to using every minute in six or seven ways. Then I got sad about it. I wanted to bake with the bakers who do one thing at a time, sometimes staring out the window, sometimes forgetting the recipe, sometimes lapsing into a long memory of someone they only kind of knew. Maybe that immersion in a moment, unscripted and undocumented, makes the act of baking a cake a bit more like tasting a cake—butter and chocolate and spices—or like sitting, afterward, with friends, the taste fading.
                and what happens next / I don’t remember yet. Reading Annie Liu’s book, I feel a different kind of time, a different kind of sinking into now and next, memory and forgetting. In “The Story” Liu leaves blank lines for a story she hears: the space is there, and empty. It’s not gathered into something concrete, though it’s also not erased. She refers to it, even if we don’t see the “it” she’s referring to. There’s something here even as something’s gone. So I think about baking: the heat of the oven and the smell of the cake. The way both slip away. A blurry moment after mixing the batter together and before—who knows what?
I want to live more in time like that.