Being Remembered

 I've always struggled with the concept of "out of sight, out of mind." This is a two-way street in that I'm sure most people I come across will forget me. Heck, when I was young, I was deathly afraid that my pets would forget who I was if I were gone just for a few days. All this happens despite constant reminders that my belief is a falsehood.

Earlier today I went to my bank to make a deposit. I have been saving for a big trip for quite some time and my preferred savings method is via $2 bills. As I entered the bank, a branch I haven't been in for over a decade, both tellers greeted me by name. I'm sure one of them was cursing my name after a deposit of so many $2s, but how did they remember me?

It actually brought a smile to my face, to be remembered after so long, but I was also confused. How many people do they see in a day? A week? Or in this case a decade? How did they remember? I don't know, and for myself I worried if anyone expected me to do so. I'm horrible with names but not in the case of being on the tip of my tongue; I'm bad at names because I try not to use them. Truly, I will do everything I can in person to not use a name be it a raised hand, a raised eyebrow, anything to not have to use a name.

Why avoid names? Oddly, it's because it's too person for me. At a race track I'll use names over the radio, but in person I won't. This makes it even more amazing, in my mind, that those two tellers remembered not only me but my name.

Lastly, this makes me sad. I know it is of the utmost respect to remember someone like they did and I'm not sure I'll ever be able to show that level of respect to someone I might've seen briefly once a month over a decade ago. I wish I could. I hope those that I can't remember won't hold it against me. I wish I could remember names, and faces which are hard because I try to avoid looking at people because there's so much information to process in a face, but it's amazing just how fast reminders come about being on the autism spectrum for myself.