Terrified of Amnesia
Simu-audioblog
I’m finding myself running desperately after memories these days. It’s not unlike trying to remember the distinct details, curves, and graces on the face of someone in a passing train.
Not that my life is so important, or the people in them so extraordinary. But the fact remains that they are so very very important to me.
Today I lost my equilibrium because I couldn’t remember what my mother’s hair smelled like. After a few moments of panic, clawing through the wreckage that is my brain, tossing memories around as if they were sheaves of paper or mountains of October maple leaves, I finally calmed myself after retrieving a ridiculously simple sensory memory. She was always fond of Suave’s Strawberry shampoo.
I forget how long it had been since I’d gone for a walk with my father. I forget the street names in my neighborhood. I forget the names and faces from high school. I forgot that I had once learned how to knit. Or that I had taken modeling classes at some point. Or that I would cry during dodgeball. I forget birthdays. I sometimes forget appointments. I forget where I’ve placed things. I forget to breathe sometimes.
My journals, started somewhere in 1979 or so, were to record memories…but now with a public journal I’m terrified about the things that I want desperately to remember in all their terrible, glorious and intimate details. Unfortunately, for one reason or another I can’t publish them. I can’t create a personal artifact for future self archeological diggings. I could pose them here as fiction, or hearsay, or something that happened to the proverbial friend, but even then, it would be false in the re-reading and recall of that particular memory, failing to be properly seated in the first person.
I did this.
I felt this.
I wanted this.
And this, this made me weep in a way that made my shoulders shake. This made me want to run and hide in my bedroom closet beneath a stack of thick blankets while I covered my ears…just like I did when my parents used to fight when I was a child.
I had a dream last night of suffocating. It’d been about 4 years since I had that dream. Of the weight of my blanket, over my chest becoming heavier, thicker, and with a distinct mass of a body on top of me that started to crush my chest and sank my body into the mattress as it slowly became darker and darker and darker.
I called in sick to work today. A pounding headache that demanded rest, comfort, and staring out the window as the sun light slowly blessed the trees outside.Still in bed at 11, with my head turned towards an outside world that makes me feel ever so small, I was only wishing that those sweet memories, I could file again neatly in my head. Others, I wished I could burn.
No Comments Yet