Transit Slips: Memory as Material
On cataloging and circulating memories within your personal library of life experience.
The idea came to me in a flash as most do, without my fullest understanding or consent. I’d write a series of “transit slips” — fragments, snippets, and memories — and the only rule I had for myself was to write freely without interruption to censor, edit, or analyze.
The words would flow in the morning after reading a few books, taking lots of notes, and then letting my mind wander to places lost to the continuum. I strung those words together like a weird necklace and they became what I referred to as “micro-essays.”
“What’s a transit slip,” my sister asked. “You know, like a receipt,” I answered. I’d collected many (receipts) as a traveler, and I started to feel like memories themselves were a strange kind of dream receipt from invisible trips. I wanted to make them visible as evidence of the distance I’d traveled — or perhaps to show how far the memory itself had traveled — to reach me.
But then I did some digging and realized that transit slips are actually a “thing” within the universe of library circulation systems — a printed document that accompanies materials as they move from one place to another — between branches, to storage, or into a reader’s hands.
And so I started to think about our memories as materials we circulate in lifetime. The status of a memory depends on our willingness to track and take inventory. Is a memory even available to you? Perhaps it’s available, but only to you. Or maybe a memory is checked out or needs to get renewed. Perhaps a memory is on hold, waiting for you to find it. Or it’s on a shelf, ready for you to pick it up. Or maybe your memory is in process, being prepared to fulfill your request to experience it.
Other times, we know that a memory is on the move as we move, in transit between locations. A memory may get lost in transit as you shift from one place to the next — details get lost or scattered along the way, or muted in the moving. Perhaps the memory gets shipped off to the future but it hasn’t yet arrived and you’re still wondering if it ever arrived. (At least a few of my memories from Zanzibar are forever in transit, lost somewhere in the sky between two oceans).
Or maybe a memory has been recently handled or returned and needs to get put back on the shelf of your life story. For instance, I remember that ballet class when I was three, but just the shoes and the mean teacher and her fuzzy beige cardigan, her hair clips, but nothing else.
Maybe you checked in the memory but it still lacks category or definition. Where would you place it in the personal archive if you had the chance to reorganize it? Is this a ballet dream or a girlhood dream? Is this memory of Zanzibar, or a memory of the person who thought she could live there forever?
We all know that memories present problematic and exceptional states. The missing memory: it’s not found where you expected it; or it’s lost in transit, declared irretrievable even after a deep search with the help of therapists and somatic practices. Perhaps there’s a problem with claims returned — you say you returned the memory to yourself, but your internal system hasn’t yet confirmed it. Or even worse—a damaged memory — the one that needs repair.
(I remember my ex’s limp, and his missing tooth, I remember the gash on his leg from the motorcycle accident, I remember how he waved a knife in my face, but surely there’s more to this series.)
Sometimes a memory gets stuck in a state of perpetual processing with the hopes of being cataloged or repaired. Or it remains on order — not yet arrived. I wish I could remember more about my sisters but most of my earliest memories star me as the main character. Maybe a memory has been withdrawn from the archive or discarded, removed from the permanent collection. (That’s what a few rounds of EMDR did for me and a few select memories about my mother, but that’s a story for another day.)
What if we could borrow the language and formal structure of library transit slips to contain our memories as materials from the personal library of experience? To treat them not just as logistical tools, but as poetic artifacts — traces of where a memory originated, where it’s gone, and what it still carries?
During the month of February, my transit slips explored themes of transition and displacement, connection and the continuous present, using other braided texts as my inspiration. But I wonder what would happen if I pushed the format and language of transit slips to create short pieces that mapped these transits—the stories that live in the spaces between origin and destination, leaving and returning.
How would you identify or label your memory? Where did it begin and where does it surface now? What was the date of the occurrence and what is the date of the recall request? Could you include subject or keywords? A description of the memory itself? Could you describe its condition upon retrieval — faded, distorted, fragmented, intact, altered, uncertain? How would you describe any current access restrictions?
Does the memory return at-will or only when you’re not looking for it? What are its handling instructions? Is this a fragile memory, one that’s drenched in poison? Or is this a solid memory, as sturdy as a sunflower on a sunny day?
I collect certain memories that move between shelves within me but never leave the inner library. What would anyone else do with the dhow and the crabs, the scabs and the scraps, the amulets and the actual hotel receipts? Sometimes a memory is too heavy to circulate, too cumbersome to shift from its current, stubborn form.
Let’s discuss associated materials — is there a related song that connects with that memory — perhaps a face you can no longer construct but still see in your mind’s eye? A forgotten promise or tiny detail from the records that never made it into the original register? A mole. A lisp. A stench. A wave.
Could you account for gaps and missing data in the memory? What happened just before the memory in question and what happened right after? Why does that matter to anyone handling the memory in the present tense? This gets tricky when the timeline collapses or deflates—trust no longer factors for the teller or the told.
Where was the memory’s last known location? In the body? In the mind? In the spirit? In a journal? In the living memory of the world that went on without you? I keep most of my materials within me, in the hips where there’s new pain forming at the joints. Or does the memory live somewhere behind the eyes? Buried in the furthest corners of your heart? In the basement tucked inside a mildewed book?
And finally, what’s the current transit status of your memory? Is this memory still in circulation or on hold? Recalled or lost? Returned to storage or misremembered? Damaged beyond repair or ready to share? My memories circulate in a perpetual draft state, but they change shape when I bend a sentence or two, as a I grew. Leave any memory notes as marginalia.
To read the “transit slips” that came to me as micro-essays in February 2026, read them here.
I’m thinking about leading a series of “transit slips” writing workshops over the summer and I’m still playing around with the extent to which we may want to borrow from the form and language of actual transit slips as a way to conceptualize the writing. But for now, I think the questions that come from the form itself are quite useful—and playful—the way we think of memory as material—as something in motion—and changing incrementally as it circulates throughout our lives.