I’m Starting to Forget My Life
Maybe we can blame it on the drugs.
Perhaps allowing the moderate teenage consumption of alcohol and cannabis to devolve into a daily deluge of brain-caging narcotics really wasn’t the best thing for a still-forming mind. Ceaseless maelstroms of stimulants and sedatives. Benzo/amphetamine cocktail crusades leading me through flurries of multi-colored powders and spitting me out into a pool of black tar of which took me years to climb out. The naïve conviction that you’ll live forever fueling the young hubris of overindulgence can really do a number on your long-term memory.
Maybe I’ve been focusing so much on what comes next that I’m starting to forget what’s already been.
When we finally start to climb out of our immaturity and into shells more suited for adult living, we tend to fixate on the important things ahead instead of dwelling on the raucous behavior of the past. We start spending our time on different activities and so the things we’ve grown accustomed to get relegated to our memory banks instead of being actively thought about. The natural progression of experience and the subconscious mind filtering out what it deems no longer important.
Regardless of any newfound maturity or the paltry pursuits of ancient history, maybe it’s simply a fact of aging.
We get older and memories start to fade into the static. Talk to anyone over a decade older than you and you’ll see how little they really remember from the time they were your age. Some people were blessed with a stronger recall, of course, others with worse. Most people remember the big moments of their life while the smaller details begin to get fuzzy and start blending into each other. Names are lost, places mistook for others, events remembered differently than those standing right next to you at the time they happened. It all seems like a fairly normal pattern that can be seen everywhere you look, from the people who raised you to the peers you grew up with.
I’m starting to forget my life.
I’m only 33, and yet in the past few years I’ve noticed that my memory has gotten noticeably worse. Short-term as well as long. Like I said, I know the chemical debauchery of my younger self definitely didn’t help, but I can’t really blame it all on that alone.
This feels like how things just naturally go when you start entering new phases of your life, but that fact also feels like someone is deleting the stats and attributes I’ve acquired while playing the video game of living. It feels unfair to have done so much, gone so many places, made so many memories and seemingly unforgettable moments with friends, just to forget them all anyways.
I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve laughed till I cried over absurd and ridiculous things my buddies and I made up while sitting around bored. I also couldn’t tell you about a single one of those things. I just don’t remember. Poof. Gone. Experiencing the absolute peak of my life’s happiest moments as I held my stomach in roaring pain and felt tears of joy in my eyes as my cheeks began to get sore from stretching into a smile wider than my face wanted to allow, and I can’t even remember when that happened, let alone what we were even laughing about. I know it’s happened more times than I can count, but I guess remembering even one time is apparently too high a number.
Things like this depress me to no end. If I can’t even remember my most joyful moments, how am I expected to remember anything else? It’s been so long since those days now. I’ve spent the past few years focused on the future, or at least trying to. I moved across the country and immediately set my life up in the exact same way I had lived it back home. It didn’t even occur to me until a year or two into living on the West Coast that I essentially just recreated my former life with lesser versions of the people I had loved and left behind.
More time goes by, more experiences that are pale comparisons to my past, and at some point I turn 30. I realize that I can’t recreate what has come and gone, and so I do what most of us millennials have been doing when we’re finally confronted with the reality of getting older — I convince myself that I need to start taking life seriously while ignoring the obvious truth that I don’t actually want to. I look to the future for salvation in the form of some eventual career, or toy with the idea that maybe having children is the only way to truly give your life meaning, and I try not to look back to that carefree time too often, lest I realize that I will never be so free again.
Time ticks by, and more of my life sinks into subconscious static. I can feel the memories disappearing into the ether.
Maybe they’re still there somewhere and I just don’t have the keys to access them. Maybe the whole “life flashed before my eyes” thing that people talk about after encounters with death is really just that — finally being given back your memories. You can finally remember what you said to that one person at that one bar that one night that made them like you so much. You can remember the sage piece of wisdom you heard in an unexpected place. You can remember how it felt to hurt someone who loved you, and the ache of regret in the years that followed. You can remember all the parties where you felt accepted and cherished, all the morning headaches that followed, and you can finally remember the all the jokes that had you and your friends on the floor holding in your guts.
But I can’t right now. I can barely remember any of it. And the knowledge that memory only gets worse with time makes me feel as if I’m standing near a waterfall trying to hold onto my most precious moments, trying to catch new ones flowing towards me, and watching as they all fumble from my arms and slip silently over the edge.
I’m starting to forget my life.
It gives me a sense of urgency as if I need to do something about it now. It also gives me a sense of impending tragedy because I know it’s a losing battle. I know that these very thoughts will disappear as easily as my most prized recollections, and there’s nothing I can very much do about it. I suppose saving these words in a digital form acts as a sort of external storage for my brain, but reading this sentence when I’m 80 will never evoke the experiential memory I’ll want it to.
I knew I should have been taking more pictures.
There’s some, but not as many as there should be. It always seems to be the case that the people you’re closest to are the ones you have the least amount of photos with.
Not one photo survived of the apartment my best friend and I lived in when we were in college. It was only a little over a decade ago, but I can’t remember what my room looked like. I do remember taking sugar cube acid and roaming around campus cracking up at how desolate and creepy it was at night. I remember once waking up to splashing water because my bathroom sink was overflowing on its own. Apparently, the old Asian lady who lived above me had been stuffing her leftover food down her own bathroom sink, therefore causing mind to erupt with water filled with tiny pieces of broccoli and onion. I tried plunging it for awhile before leaving my then girlfriend to deal with it because I had class. I remember the maintenance guy who came to fix it cussing a lot about the lady above me and commenting on the fact that I had an “awful lot of shittin’ paper” under the sink. I remember that same girlfriend telling me she had been pregnant because she had a miscarriage while on the toilet. Apparently it was too small to notice, but too big not to. She said she flushed it away and I remember wondering how long I would have to console her about it. I remember I was thankful it was gone and that I didn’t have to pay for it. I remember being an asshole. I remember finding a live bat in the heating duct one day, failing to remove it, and finding it dead in the middle of my friend’s bedroom somehow a day later. I remember throwing our old, ragged couch over our second story balcony because we couldn’t find anyone to help us move it out. I remember we sacrificed one wall specifically for doodling drunken nonsense onto. I remember it taking four coats of paint to cover it up and the marker ink still showing through, and then my friend knocking over the paint bucket onto the carpet, so we decided to say fuck the deposit, threw a towel over the paint spill Big Daddy style, and left for good only to get a bill for $800 a year later.
Life feels like that wall. Different eras covered in all sorts of abstract graffiti, some pictures had effort put into them, most were scribbled by sauced-up lunatics. Each year another layer is added onto the wall by the white paint of time. It does its best to cover the vandalism, but the brightest parts still faintly show through. Even so, you’ll never again be able to see the mural for what it once was, and eventually the space in which your life resided will be taken over by new tenants.
I remember those specific moments living in that particular apartment, but not much in between. I can’t fill in the gaps, and I can’t recall the order of events that took place there. Is that enough, though? Is that all we really get? General outlines of what happened during certain times of our life, most of which will be lost to history? How do all of you out there deal with this? The older folks, especially. Do you have any advice on holding onto your life? Do we just become so habituated to living in the urgency of the current moment that we also become accustomed to forgetting the moments in our life that mattered most to us? Is this normal for someone at 33 years old to already be forgetting what happened in his 20’s? I don’t want to forget the moments that shaped me, and with each passing day it feels as if I already have. It feels as if that time in my life has all coalesced into one shade of temporary existence and thinking back on that time only tints my memory with that particular hue. Bits and pieces stand out, moments of novelty and newness, but for the most part it’s all crackling into a single static; a station on the radio that no longer gets good reception, so we stick with the popularity of the present, coming in crisp and clear.
The feeling is subtle and insidious. As if we’ve been hypnotized into believing that where we’re going is more important than where we’ve been. In some cases, this is true, but to me it feels as if I’m getting a rotten deal. It strips me of motivation to care for anything currently unfolding in my life, because I know it will simply dissolve away like the rest of it. Today, I couldn’t tell you the difference between two weeks I lived a decade ago, one of which I was probably on top of the world and the next I was probably watching eight hours of tv and feeling like a useless piece of shit. Now, it’s all the same static. I can’t even remember when those things happened, but I know they did, and sitting here right now I have zero feelings about it.
What about in 10 more years? How exactly will I feel about this very moment? Unless I’m reading these exact words, I won’t even remember that this moment existed. I’ll have a vague recollection that this was a time where I was still trying to figure out my life and was writing more often, but I won’t remember this day, this hour, this minute, this second. Obviously, I’m not expecting to remember every second of my life, but still, when years start blending together into eras, you start to look back and see nothing but the same swirling soup of forgotten experience and fading memory.
The cereal is getting soggy and sinking to the bottom. All I see is milk and my spoon of recollection only pulls up the same indistinguishable mush.
I’m starting to forget my life.
I can feel the slow erosion of my most cherished moments, and I fear for what time will take next. But if I can’t hold onto the best parts, then I don’t want the worst.
And since it’s the case that I’m forgetting the moments of my life I wish to hold onto tighter than anything, my only solace is the hope that if I’m lucky, this moment of fear, of anxiety and mourning for an age lost to time, this moment regret and tragic nostalgia, will be forgotten as well.
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