Memory

Driving along the coast of Malbu I tell my friend about how at 28 my memory's been worse than ever. He says the same is true for him. I'm so porous these days, everything slips through. Another friend tells me about her morning and I ask her to repeat herself not ten minutes later. I have the feeling that I used to be better but I don't know for sure. The life I've lived passes by me in flashes, for the most part I'm wandering aimlessly in the present, chasing my mind in circles.

In 2024 I thought to myself, "this is not my life, this is not the life I was meant to lead" and I grappled with it all year. Other people were thinking it too, there was that terrible movie about the guy with the disfigured face, but also my two friends expressed the same. Just a general dissatisfaction with the state of things, with the choices we're making and the people we are. I wonder if it has anything to do with memory?

I didn't have these feelings a couple years ago, I was unhappy then too, but it was of a different kind. I was chasing something I wanted and not getting it, I had a vision of who I was meant to be that I wasn't living up to. Now that vision is gone. There's an extent to which it was crafted by the memories I had of myself, the times I remember feeling happy, the ones I remember feeling sad, these told a story that drew a conclusion which was the person I was meant to become. But now I don't have those anymore, or at least they don't feel as important.

There's this thing about Saturn returning in your late 20s that Kacey Musgraves sang about last year. It's an astrological concept that I don't really understand but it's supposed to initiate a time of upheaval in your life. For me this appears to be true. From the ages of 8 to 22 I was building an understanding of who I was, and I carried that with me for the last five years. That concept was built from the memories I made during those years and the truths I assumed they revealed. But now I've forgotten those things, my Saturn has returned to erase those years and leave faint traces in their place, the time has come to build anew.

Should I expect this to happen again? Is this what a mid-life crisis is? Will I awake in another 15 years and look around and not recognize myself once more? Will that too coincide with the general loss of my memories from this time now?

Memory is the trace of the self, the continuity of our identity, without it we'd be nothing but a repository of habits and tendencies clattering on without aim. I hold on to moments I do not understand but know mean something by how firmly they are etched in me. The way I can recall the light passing through the trees on a warm spring day in the park behind my childhood home, the way the grey buildings and cobbled streets of Prague rush toward me when I bike down Fountain Ave in LA, the way I think of the white farm house in upstate New York whenever I look at blueberries. I see them all so clearly, what are they doing there? Why have I carried them all these years? I wonder what I've lost, I wonder what will come .