For working reasons, I’ve been living between two cities for more than 30 years and, consequently, sharing two parallel lives. In one city, I live with my family, whereas in the other I live as if I were a single man. Even though it was hard in the beginning, after a transient period, with the help of my family, I got used to this life. Since then, I’ve been doing quite well with my two parallel lives, changing from one to the other every two weeks. In fact, so well adapted to my especial situation I am, that I would have real trouble getting used to a normal life, if I had to do it.
However, some new circumstances have come up in my life, shaking everything around me. The matter is that I’ve been suffering memory problems lately, and what started being a series of small oblivions in the beginning has ended up being a real mess. This problem has become even more serious since I’m living between two different cities: I’m continuously mistaking one city for the other, mixing streets, squares, places of both cities into a unique fictitious city in my mind.
After a chaotic period in which I tried to overcome the difficulty without anyone realizing, I’ve managed to adapt to my new condition. And now, I find myself carrying around a notebook (a blue or a red one, depending on the city) with all the essential information about the town, as if I were a tourist just arrived to my own city.
photofictionblog 
Very good The Tale of Two Cities. I have always thought that the good titles for books are reversible, So, for example, the Ribeyro´s memories, which I like a lot, are named The Temptation of Failure, a good title, no doubt, but if you change the order you have still a good title: The Failure of Temptation.
This also happens with The Tale of Two Cities, you can also say The City of Two Tales, and it could be maybe a tale about a city with two rival teams, like Milan or Manchester ( I can´t now imagine more examples) and how the history is told in a different way if you are from one team or the other.
See you later alligator
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Really interesting your comment, Jean Sol, about reversible titles. In fact, sometimes I have trouble remembering the right order of the title.
Regarding memory problems, I always mistake the name of a spanish music group from the title of a famous book about a donkey. I usually have to think twice which is the group and which the book.
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Interesting to show how human beings can adapt to such a wide range of situations, environments and find the way to make the best of it all. In this case a whole life in two different places living to lives without generating any conflict but, on the contrary, finding it struggling to come back to a standard type of life.
Just today i explained in class how the memory works and, as you show, «external aids» are very convenient indeed to help to recall. I’ll propose my students to have a look to this post in order to promote a significant learning, with guarantees better recall rates than mechanical one, which most probably is what they did today morning.
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Nice explanation of the matter, dear AOG. Regarding our memory, I think that due to the extensive use ( or abuse) of so many electronic gadgets, we are loosing our memory capacity little by little, don’ you think? I can remember when you knew the telephone number of all your friends, for example.
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