Found my old blog and couldn’t login so I’m pasting this here because this is the only post I want to remember.
& suddenly time feels personal
(May 3, 2017)
***
The center keeps moving and I’ve been trying to accept my new norm of bursting into spurts of “I can’t breathe” and of having to talk myself into being settled enough to function day-to-day. It’s a funny state to be in. And after a conversation with a friend, I’ve come (or we’ve both come) to realize that this attempt of centering one’s self can easily be rooted in the act of simply telling yourself: “you’re fucking thirty.”
It’s funny how much power being thirty gives you. Is this what growing up feels like?
***
Ever since it happened, time has suddenly felt more personal — as I’m suddenly made aware that every day could lead to a moment no one is really prepared for. But what is time but experiences halved by the number of days you can/will remember?
Or as I had once written it as:
I think about time as a series of succession halved by experience that happens within a given frame, those finite moments recalled and rendered as scenes, those photographs in motion that should be assumed to be incomplete, creating the possibility of added meaning when placed against what has been deleted, or in other words, forgotten, a process noted as something involuntary because the act of forgetting can never be something voluntary, how there will always be something remembered in its place, like how the act of forgetting a particular moment will be remembered as the time taken to forget a particular moment and how it will all eventually loop back in on itself—all of these placed in opposition to moments recalled vis-à-vis dates marked in a calendar or time recorded on notebooks. When I think about these and voice them out in words—a conversation that begins with: Do you remember when…—I notice how I would at times misunderstand the number of years that have passed, usually the result of underestimating the speed of time, or the speed of experience catching up to time, how something could happen quite a while back and yet feel somewhat fresh, as if it had just happened only a month ago.
The time I’ve been existing in as of late has been bound to a loop of this same, new, scary, unexpected constant.
***
So this is how it feels. As a kid, I used to imagine how it would feel — knowing that one day I’d be in a situation where it hits me directly. But when you’re 10, you don’t really know how it would feel. Sure. You can take scenes from TV and movies and act them out in your head, imagined scenarios that’ll feel a thousand times removed from reality with a numbness borne from that innocence of being a child, of thinking that forever exists.
Literally, I was the type of kid who’d say: “I will never get married because I’ll be with you forever and will never leave you and you won’t die and I won’t die and we’ll live together forever and ever. Amen.”
***
Going back to the day we found out: Thursday, 20th April, 2017.
Will it matter that I remember? That I have this series of notes on my phone about every single day that has passed since then? That I have an entry that begins with “I’m scared to think…”
It cuts off there.
***
But there’s a sense of hope. There will always be.
***
I once wrote an essay for/about you — an attempt to trace how we got to where we are now; and there’s a scene that goes:
“I want to be a ballerina like her.”
“I thought you wanted to be a dentist?”
“I like pink. Ballerinas are always in pink.”
Sitting on the bed, watching you brush your teeth over the sink, a book on my lap—that one book I used to carry around with me growing up, the one about how a girl had followed through with her dream of becoming a ballerina. I watched you gesture your teeth towards me, those dentures you used to chase me around the house with, how there was a time I used to cry whenever I saw you without teeth, mere gums moving to speak to me.
“Look. Pink.”
“Not that type of pink!”
“Why not?”
“Because that’s your teeth!”
“You should still be a dentist.”
“You only want me to become a dentist so I can fix your teeth for free.”
“And you would, right?”
“Maybe.”
***
All I want to do is remember. So I’ve pulled my box of old photos out of hiding, to see/touch/smell how everything began and to understand that even though we haven’t been okay for the past few years, at the root of it all, I’m still your little girl.
Why do we yearn for old photographs during times like this?
***
It’s easy to not think/talk/write about it; but I have to. I have to record this. I have to remember how I’m feeling right now as I write this. It’s 3:30 AM on a Wednesday morning and you’re in the hospital and I’m still listening to Mogwai and I love you and want you to be better. I’ll see you later.