The Stack, The Sleeve, The Self

“We forget to remember.” —Sappho

I have a thesis: memory is basically a cache with aggressive eviction, and nostalgia is just a misconfigured LRU policy. When I say this out loud at Friday Night Magic, nobody responds because they are busy shuffling. Still, I write it at the top of my notebook—a graph-paper notebook, because lines are too linear for the multiverse—and I underline it twice. Good literature has a thesis, I learned that this week. Or maybe that was my CS 101 professor. Either way, it applies.

The store is ordinary in a statistically significant way: flickering fluorescent lights (Hz unknown), a soda fridge that hums like it has thoughts, a carpet that looks like someone tried to render Perlin noise with dust. There are posters for planes I haven’t visited but will, someday, mentally: Zendikar, Innistrad, my own destiny. But I am most enchanted by the mundane phenomenon of glossy card sleeves. The air inside the sleeve feels trapped, a tiny universe of fingerprints. When I slide a card in, it whispers—like a secret the card knows about me that I do not (yet) remember.

I hold a Lightning Bolt and it reflects the ceiling light; I am briefly illuminated like a protagonist. The sleeve catches a static hair; it sticks; I am unreasonably amazed. This is the enchantment of the mundane: a plastic rectangle that holds another paper rectangle that holds a typographic spell that holds an emotion. I could look at that for hours. Honestly, I often do.

Tonight matters because I am going to win FNM. This is not arrogance; it is an arc. Jung had arcs. That’s a fact I think I remember. The official theme of this month’s /lit/ competition (which is basically like Regionals for people who know about Proust) is “the impermanence of memory,” and if I win, it will prove that memory is impermanent but victory is cached to disk. Eternal. Like ROM. Not the card, the computer thing. Although, yes, also the card.

Round one, I sit across from a guy named Mike who has a beard that looks like a complication. He’s on Selesnya Enchantments, which is ironic because I am the one enchanted. By sleeves. By the click of a die hitting the table. By the way the Judge box has a slightly misprinted star. By how the soda fridge’s hum modulates exactly when someone opens it—doppler shift, probably. I tell Mike this because literature requires sensory detail. He asks if I’m okay. I say yes, I am doing an arc.

Between games I try to recall my grandmother’s voice. Not in a sad way, more in a scientifically curated observation: last year I could remember the pitch contour of her laugh (it went like a sine wave, cheerfully), but now it’s mostly an empty MP3 tag. The mental file is there but the bytes are zeroed. Meanwhile I can perfectly reconstruct my opponent’s deck list from a single turn cycle. It appears memory is biased toward optimization, not affection. If Hume were here, he’d concede. Or at least he’d be proud. Or maybe he wouldn’t; that’s the problem with historical hypotheticals: low coherence.

Game two, I top-deck the exact Bolt I admired earlier and say “mathematically inevitable.” Mike says, “You drew it off the top.” I say, “Exactly.” He does not appreciate the elegance. He scoops. My notebook gets a new line: Observation 1: The universe is a library where the books are your own first drafts, and the shelves are badly indexed. I underline that three times.

Round two, I face Jess. She has holographic sleeves and a smile that could probably be a keyword (Vigilance?). She orders a grape soda. I immediately like grape soda. She asks, “Is that your thesis notebook?” I try to say something devastatingly literary, like “Every sleeve is a coffin for a moment,” but what comes out is “Yeah.” It’s okay. Protagonists often fail early, then triumph. That’s called “rising action” and is mandatory.

We play. I forget to crack a fetch land and take two damage later, which is impermanence right there, embodied. Loss is a kind of forgetting, and forgetting is a kind of loss, so I’m doing powerful motifs all over the place. I also remember to hold up Mana Leak and catch her Collected Company, which statistically validates my capacity for long-term plot planning. Jess laughs and says, “Nice.” This is foreshadowing of a general romance vibe.

Between turns I inventory the room. The fan over table three ticks every seventh rotation. The tape on the front counter is layered like geological strata. A kid in a hoodie reads a rule card out loud—every clause a sacrament of bureaucracy. I feel… this is the best word… enchanted by it. Like I want to sleeve the entire store so it doesn’t take damage from time.

I win on exactsies. Jess shrugs and says, “Good games, protagonist.” She actually says that, which is incredible, because now the text is self-aware and therefore postmodern. I write, Observation 2: When someone calls you protagonist, they’re basically granting you hexproof. She asks if I want half her Twizzlers. I interpret this as symbol.

Round three, I play the store champion, an adult with a real watch. He shakes my hand with narrative finality. He plays control. I play into it and call that my fatal flaw (hamartia) because I’ve read summaries of Aristotle. He drops a Teferi, and time becomes textured. I stare at the plus-one ability and think about my grandmother’s clock that chimed off-schedule, the way my brain now can only remember the idea of her hands turning, not the sound. Teferi’s ultimate is an emblem—a permanent memory of authority—and it hits me: there are no emblems in life. Just tokens that decay at end step. That’s basically the theme of this piece and also my whole deal.

It’s match point. He’s at three. I’m at one and top-decking on fumes and theories. I look at my deck and feel the absolute precision of destiny. You must understand: I built this deck like an equation. I set the coefficients (4 Bolts, 4 Opts, 2 Snapcaster Mages, plus tech) such that the outcome is scientifically inevitable: I will draw Bolt on the exact turn where it reads like Literature. Ockham’s Razor says the simplest resolution is also the most heroic. I pull. It is Lightning Bolt. The ceiling light catches. The sleeve gives a polite whisper. I put it on the stack and look directly into destiny’s face. I say (out loud): “This is my thesis.”

I win FNM.

The store briefly transforms from ordinary to mythic. The soda fridge hum becomes a chorus. The fan stutters like applause. The tape strata on the counter look like graduation bands. Everyone claps, I think, or maybe they just shuffle louder. The judge says “nice.” The owner pats my shoulder and says, “Great play, kid.” Jess raises her grape soda in what is probably a toast to my heavy-handed theme. A tiny electric storm of plastic sleeves surrounds me, and for once, the universe feels exactly sleeve-fit.

Now for the part with classical closure. I walk home in the accumulation of night data points: streetlights mapped at known intervals, sidewalks quantized into slabs. I attempt to recall my grandmother’s voice again. I can’t. The slot is still blank, a card drawn from a graveyard with no legal target. But I remember the precise texture of the Bolt sleeve at the moment of victory. My fingertips tingle with static, and I think, embarrassingly, that this sensation is the true memorial: not a voice, but friction. I don’t like what that implies, but it’s honest.

Back in my dorm, my roommate is watching videos of people opening packs; he calls it research. I lay my deck out on my bed like sacred geometry. The cards are rectangles, like windows, like poems. I write Observation 3: Memory is not a library. It’s a sideboard. You hope you brought the right fifteen. I underline it four times. This is genuinely profound because it’s both about Magic and also not about Magic. That’s called “universal resonance,” which is how you win the Nobel Prize in Literature, or at least a thread on /lit/ with fifty replies.

I open my notebook to the first page where the thesis lives, and I draw an arrow to revise it—revisions are how you know you’re serious. Revised Thesis: Memory is a cache that intentionally drops the packets that hurt to store. What remains is what you handle enough to burn in: sleeves, soda hums, overconfident quips, and the surprisingly sharp corners of victory. The rest deallocates silently. I am okay with this, academically. Sentimentally, I am a complicated sorcery.

As a final gesture, because good stories end with an image, I stand and look out the window. The campus is ordinary on purpose: a sodium-orange parking lot, a vending machine blinking 12:00 like it’s midnight forever, a girl on a skateboard dragging her foot to brake, sparking very slightly. I am enchanted by the finite spark. It’s a tiny Shock to reality, two damage to the night. It won’t last. The spark is already gone. But I can write it down, sleeve it between paper covers, and call that permanence even though we both know it isn’t.

Tomorrow I will try again: to remember, to forget better, to arrange my deck so that the math conspires with the narrative. I will be the kind of person who taps their heart for red mana during office hours and asks the TA whether grief is a state-based action. He will say no, but I will netdeck an answer regardless.

For now, I put the Bolt back in my deck. I press the sleeve down from the top until the card sits flush. The air trapped inside makes a miniature sigh, or maybe that’s just me. Either way, I annotate it. Either way, it counts.

Thus, I conclude (in the scientific sense) that memory is strictly impermanent except when it isn’t, which is when you shuffle. And yes, I know that’s contradictory; it’s called a paradox. Borges would love this. If he were at FNM, I would ask him to sign my life pad.

I turn off the light. Somewhere, in darkness, the soda fridge keeps humming. I can’t hear it. But I remember I did. That will have to be enough.

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Pub: 06 Sep 2025 19:56 UTC

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