How do I describe the memories I’ve lost? I can’t recount what I can’t remember, so I collide with a blank wall over and over. For me, it’s like reaching to pick up something, and when I finally grab it, it’s lighter than I imagined and flies out of my hand. I’ve lost it again.
Hypnotizing cloned mementos all in rows: glass domes that hover over figurines clouded in glitter. My mind shrank into itself, but that was paused by the overwhelming sense that I had dropped something essential: perhaps my keys or wallet. Maybe something I needed or maybe something I left on the bus. When the moment was over, I would step out of the silence back onto the street and spring back into the flight of reality, entirely forgetting what had just transpired internally. Complete amnesia followed the succession of things felt until it was the morrow, and I was in the same spot as before. I’m where I was the night before, and the night before, and the night before, and the night before that.
Anxiety expanded in my gut and coursed up to my chest. I didn’t know a feeling could last this long, especially one I’ve felt time after time. The journeys I made downtown had been predictably unorganized and sloppy excuses to leave the house. I had wandered out of my home and onto the bus; vulnerable, the snow globes had caught my eye, and their shimmer blotted out my memory. I felt a meltdown starting to rumble past skyscrapers clouded in snow, taking on the decorative snowglobe look. Like manifestation.
If you were to tell me of anything I’ve done in my earlier years or even a few months ago, I wouldn’t know who that premature person was or why they made those decisions. Even if that was a fully formed, grown person running around in the world, I would only recognize them as a single-cell being. I only now feel present. My self-awareness is paralyzing, but I still don’t know where I am. My own location is not so precise: I am on a street that looks like all the others. Today, I’ve run out of excuses; I am an amnesiac falling downhill.
