Recently I have some trouble falling asleep and try to remember when it first started — December, or maybe after returning from New York in January? It’s not really of any importance, except that it is. It’s the most important thing, actually, for someone like me, so used to my head hitting the pillow to immediately hitting nine hours of uninterrupted dreamland that, whenever I do experience a rare bout of sleepless nights, I’m convinced there must be something wrong. There must be a diagnosis somewhere. When you’re desperate for answers, constructs like The New Year are very useful crutches in pointing blame at some latent, perhaps nonexistent, anxiety. Nothing is more satisfying, addicting even, than assigning cause to effect, filing things away into life’s proper, chronological place and persuading yourself they’ve always neatly belonged there.
The toxic silver lining of sleeplessness is the pursuit of this very endeavor, revisiting the very last memories you should be dusting off, sifting your fingers through rows of unseen movies before picking out the same ones, again, as if repetition has the power to change endings or write sense into chance. Sometimes I settle back into early fall, one weekend I’ve decided to remember too much at the cost of all the other hundred or so days that came, blurry, after it. For some reason, I find myself fixated on what I was wearing that day. I try so hard to remember, but I can’t. I try hard enough that I finally fall asleep, distressed not so much about this insignificant detail as the fact that you can apparently play something back so many times and still overlook so much.
I like to believe I’ve memorized certain moments of my life to the point of perfection, but maybe it’s more accurate to say I just repeat them, unknowingly retouching them piece by piece until what I remember, or what I tell myself I remember, is an entirely different beast altogether. Reciting a memory doesn’t enforce it so much as fray it around the edges, like a game of telephone, until you’re not quite sure whether you were the victim or the protagonist or both or neither. Once, Ian Crouch writes, he reached the fifth page of a novel before realizing he finished the whole thing three years ago. I’ve always hated that, “the curse of reading and forgetting,” that we can read entire books just to feel good about ourselves or to tell people that we did, and then forget them entirely, left only with a flash of feeling, a scent that lingers. Maybe that’s what bothered me so much about my desperate attempts at recall — if I really did read something, shouldn’t I be able to say something about it other than, “It made me feel sad”? Basic details, like what I was wearing that day? Where do we get the confidence to redirect whole scenes of our lives, over and over, when we barely even remember them?
I actually don’t remember much of fall this year at all. I remember instead summer slowly bleeding into winter with nothing in between, which of course is ludicrous, considering that is quite literally what fall is. I don’t mean that in the ways we sprinkle “Time flies,” or “I can’t believe it’s already ____,” into group chats and casual conversation, but more like my body feels the weight of having accomplished something grand while my brain struggles to catch up. It happened either too slow or too quick, but I’m not sure which — like very fast fog, or watery honey. Remembering feels like that sometimes, trying to grasp onto something before realizing it’s already become a part of you. Remembering is not shaped like objects or events to conveniently shelve away, although if it were, perhaps I’d be sleeping better.
One Wednesday, about four months later and long past any visible remnants of fall, I walked into a coffee shop for a quick breather and slowly spiraled into panic. I don’t remember why I needed the breather in the first place, but I remember crying — in the horribly silent, public way, before deciding to sit in my car instead and let myself cry uglier, unhinged. I don’t remember what I was wearing that day, either, but I remember a larger loneliness than maybe I’ve ever felt before and committing to never feel that way again. I don’t even remember what I ate that morning, which is strange, because I do remember panic and guilt while overthinking what I’d eaten that morning. I remember the whole day like that. Panic. I remember so much of fall like that, too.
When things don’t make sense, we give them names that do, just as I’ve decided to christen what really was just a very bad day into a watershed panic attack. I keep catching myself doing this, rewriting history and grasping for structure as if it’s time for the next first day of school again, and I wonder how long it takes someone to outgrow the quarter system. After graduating, you can’t actually squeeze an entire little life into 10 weeks or turn every calendar year into four, bite-sized pieces. Seasons are just seasons, not quarters, and weeks just weeks, not numbers. It can bring such sweet solace, to single out a date and organize everything else accordingly, as if the rest of our lives exist only relative to the best or worst days around them. But it is also incredibly unfair, both to fall — which, sure, was hazy and horrible, but also more than just a few miserable meltdowns — and to myself, who doesn’t need to remember all of a mess to know that I lived it.
Last week, I started falling asleep more quickly at the cost of unpleasant dreams, the ones that aren’t quite bad enough to be nightmares, but are almost crueler for how well they know you. They hit where you’re weakest, even while fast asleep. You try to leave something in October or January, but all of a sudden it’s almost March and they’re still stubbornly there. The real nightmares are the alternate universes disguised as parallel ones, where you’re playing a game of Spot the Difference, but instead of wallpaper with a new pattern or a sky with different clouds, you’re surrounded by people you love who do not recognize you. Sometimes I’m in rooms that are very familiar, too familiar, and in others I’m standing in ruins, surrounded by horrific, post-apocalyptic humanoids, but the specifics never really matter — only the aftertaste of eerie emotional cocktail, flashback mixed into hangover.
My dreams know better than I do that we don’t remember things so much as we remember how they made us feel, or later, how we decide they made us feel. There is admittedly a comfort in the details, in reading a book and committing one small plot point to memory as a party trick, but I guess there’s something humbling and comforting, also, about our ability to read thousands of them, to live a full season’s worth of them, only to take away a vague sense of yearning or warmth or loss. My dreams don’t give a shit about timelines or when summer seeped into fall seeped into winter or what I was wearing that day, but they understand how all those things made me feel. I think I don’t remember, but they tell me that I do, welcoming back with them all the worst parts of a particular weekend or Wednesday.