Time does not heal wounds. It may blur vivid colors; it may blunt sharp edges; it may smooth raw surfaces, but it does not heal wounds.

What time does, instead, is play trickery on our minds.

A random profile, a sudden inspiration.

"Where is the most romantic place you've been to?" was the question. A thousand word entry shall be my response. Response, not answer. I will not be answering the question - what follows has nothing to do with romance.

Memories are funny things. No concrete detail remains in our memories. Everything is mere color, emotion and sound. Maybe I should say no mere detail remains in our memories - everything is exclusively color, emotion and sound. Yes, perhaps then I would be getting my priorities right.

We can all be conditioned for emotions. We can be made to feel happy, sad or angry (or happy, sad and angry) with the ease of a gesture. Picture a balloon, a castle, a glacier, a cafe. These are the stimulants, and our reactions to them are conditioned; the mind will bring to its surface emotions connected with these stimulants, while the actual details of the events may elude us.

It seems my memory has, over the years, been diligently categorized by the complex filing system that is the way my brain functions. There exists the factual memory - chemical equations, grammar, Wikipedia entries, etc. But alongside it, you will find the color memory - a bank of images that make no sense in the conscious realm. These images surface in my sleep; they form the canvas of my dreams. These images are indisputably real, yet they are illogical - the sea is purple in these images, the sand is green; flowers that are tossed up in the air stay that way - they never succumb to gravity.

Oh but there is a point to this seemingly irrelevant flow of thoughts.

The point is, (and I am struggling, at this point, to find the perfect words to do my thoughts justice, instead of passing this off as mere whimsical chatter) when asked the question "Where is the most romantic place you've been to?", what my mind invokes is not the factual bank, but the one where images collect in an unintelligible heap; never to be dug through and made proper sense of.

It drags up the purple sea, the green sand, the gravity-defying flowers, but it does not drag up a place to answer the question.