I remember it was about this time last year _ weeks after my most exhausting time of the year, Elle Fashion Week, and a little bit before Halloween.
Last year, the excitement of Thailand's longest-running fashion event was clouded by the ups and downs of water _ water from the rising sea level flowing upstream and water from the North flowing downstream.
The fashion crowd anxiously looked at the frightening grey sky _ so grey there was definitely more than 50 shades of it _ and spent the in-between-show breaks checking Twitter for news about the flood situation. Not long after my mission at the fashion tent was over, I was confined to my 5th floor ivory tower, surrounded by the stinking brownish sea that stretched for more than 5km from one side of dry land to the other, and the nearest dry port was 400m away. It's not far: normally it's just a few minutes drive. But it's not quite the same on (my mother's) manually-paddled boat.
We say it like an overused cliche _ Thai people easily forget things, especially bad things. Perhaps that's why the media seems to carve into its agenda that it's their duty to remind people of these fragments of history. We dig them up, look back, reconsider, and remind the public of what shouldn't be forgotten, not because we don't have any fresher news to talk about, but because there's still the need to talk about these past tragedies and traumas.
Surely some media will choose to pick the easiest aspect to play with while remembering past disasters _ sentimentalism. There's nothing malicious about running images of victims breaking down in tears as the furious stream sweeps away their houses right in front of their eyes, or of crying little children at the rescue centre, not at all. Yet, they are not very constructive, either.
Of course there are sad stories that will bring tears _ stories of families still mourning their loss, entrepreneurs mired in post-flood debt-ridden trauma _ and there are also uplifting stories of people whose will to live can't be submerged by the deluge even when all that they once had has sunk for good. People love to read and watch them. They are emotionally fulfilling and easily digestible, although they won't answer so many questions that need to be answered.
Yes, questions that need to be answered. It's because much as we try to rejoice in the fact that whatever disaster befell us won't strike again any time soon, we know deep down that mankind will be bound to encounter some kind of disaster, whether caused by nature or by our own hands, again and again.
When it happens, it leaves as many questions as the number of corpses, victims and debris. We still need to know the whereabouts of the missing people in all the political crackdowns and what actually went on behind the operations. We still need to know about the compensation for those affected by all the rallies and riots.
We still need to know what went wrong in the bureaucracy that left state agencies hopelessly incapable of handling unexpected disasters, or of executing immediate and effective relief measures both during the tsunami and last year's flood, and we need to know how to fix such failures or whether there's been improvement at all.
And we need to know what has been done to prepare for future disasters, not just tsunamis or floods, but every other natural disaster that Thais once laughed at the possibility of occurring.
We have every right to be pessimistic, considering there was a time when we'd laugh like a deranged monkey at the possibility of a tsunami, or of Bangkok being submerged in water.
Trust me, we're living in a world where the tagline in a credit card advertisement is applicable to disasters _ "Anything is possible".
That's why while it doesn't hurt to run and rerun those emotionally-ridden images of disaster victims, there's so much more the media can do, and needs to do, when the time comes to remember the political events in October, the great flood, the tsunami, the crackdowns on the red shirts, the massacre of Muslims in Krue Sae and Tak Bai, and many other events that most would simply rather forget.
But we can't, as long as there's no sign that the public, the authorities and the powers that be have really learned from the past.
Not until we have the answers to all those questions.
Samila Wenin is Deputy Life Editor of the Bangkok Post.