Recollection Letters

To begin. To begin. I am trying, most desperately, to begin, but the task feels insurmountable, obstructed, like some invisible swath of linen is pinned between my pen and the paper. Impossible to write, impossible to think. To begin — but where? Certainly, a recollection of the incident itself is necessary, but I feel it is near useless to me unless it is accompanied by some thorough exploration of my interior mind, and I fear I cannot even think to articulate that in my present state.

And - my God! I imagine, you, my reader, are most confused at my complete lack of explanation. Well, I must say I am equally confused with you! As I see it, you do not exist, at least not in any quantifiable terms. These papers (letters?) are addressed to no one, and I have no intention of letting them be discovered, lest another person is subjected to this unholy distress. So then, why do I speak to you? Somehow, you, the idea of you, has come about as quietly and naturally as the mouse to my kitchen’s pantry. It seems I have invented you, invited you in, but for what purpose? 

Perhaps you are a sort of companion, a hand to hold as I venture into the dim unknown of recollection. As I write this (it seems this is more of a scratching than a writing), I am beginning to believe that my experience is not so singular as I originally believed it to be. For isn’t every facet of the human life some form of reaching into that dim unknown and seeing what one returns with? Perhaps then you are less of a companion, my reader, and more of an eye, one that anchors me to the familiar — a rope stretching from iris to palm. Yes, that’s it: a tether, a witness. If I can translate my thoughts and experiences through you, then surely they are solidly and unquestionably corporeal.

There exists an impossibly wide cavern between my present self and that unaffected girl who wore my glasses, my coat, my name just yesterday morning. I am nearly certain that she had never experienced a thing like this - had she? No. She hadn’t. I am certain of it. With her wits about her, and I believe she always had her wits about her, surely she would have taken notice if such a thing had occurred to her as it occurred to me: plainly and unpardonably.

     Enough of this. The other girl, me, you — it is of no importance now. Now that I hang suspended in this cavern, the weary rope bridge crumbling behind me, my only hope for salvation relies on my ability to fortify myself and continue onward. So I must begin.

I had been — what had I been doing? It was morning. I had been neither in a rush nor at my leisure; I moved through my routine in such an indistinctive manner that I can only guess as to how it happened. I suppose, employing a sort of cerebral muscle memory, that at that time, I had just finished my breakfast and had gone to rinse the coffee from my mouth. Following that, I suppose I had gathered my things: my books, my house key, my coat. It was likely then that I went to put on my shoes.

This I do remember: when I opened the coat closet by the front door, the habitual home for all my shoes, I found only an empty place where they should have been. A wave of confusion washed over me as I searched the closet, then the surrounding area. Nothing, nothing. I moved, slowly, through the apartment, scanning the floors. Then, I looked through every other closet, including the one that holds the linens. Nothing. As I rule, I store all my shoes in that coat closet, so as to not track mud throughout the apartment, and I repeated this rule to myself as I searched it again, still to no avail. Another sweep of the apartment. Another search of the closets. I collapsed, frustrated, to the floor.

As I stared at the ceiling, I attempted, as it is so often advised to do, to retrace my steps from the previous evening. I had been home nearly all day, with the exception of a short trip to mail some letters. What did I do when I returned home? I tried to remember, but I found myself picturing my body from another’s eyes, as though I was watching a film. I watched this oblivious girl come through the door, drop her bag at her feet, shrug off her coat, but could see nothing of the shoes. I could not get inside her head; it was as though she was an entirely different person, who concealed herself within me, quietly, and only emerged when I wasn’t paying attention.

I stood and began to pace, a growing sense of hysteria bashing itself into the walls of my ribcage. This second, hidden self was a most distressing idea. Yes, I thought, occasionally, there are tasks so menial, so inconsequential, that the mind sees no need to etch them into the memory’s archives, and this is almost certainly the explanation for this incident. And yet — and yet. How much of my life has been spent in this state of unknowing? How many times has this other self emerged and acted in my place? How many seemingly inconsequential memories have I lost to her throughout the years? And furthermore, I thought, my mind racing, what evidence do I have that these moments are inconsequential at all?

I allowed my pacing to slow and collapsed into my armchair. I felt it was imperative to comb through my memories and see which ones had become affected, how much time has been lost, so I began to recall, to the best of my ability, my life in its entirety. I thought of my youth, and the long summer afternoons spent with my mother and sister. Luncheons held in our backyard, trips into the city to visit galleries, passing conversations and laughter in the kitchen. Then, my adolescence, with its angsts, sorrows, little rebellions. Leaping from my window to ride my bicycle through the neighborhood streets. Endless arguments with my mother. And even later, a mellowing. Returning to the galleries. Befriending my mother again and resuming our friendly conversations, the kitchen laughter.

Sentimental as they were, these memories suddenly seemed to me a hazed mosaic, as though these small, tinted fragments of time were plucked from some novel and compiled in my head. They had lost their sharpness, their transparency. They had become opaque — the glass rubbed fuzzy by the overlapping days of my life crashing ceaselessly upon the shore. Yes, I remembered the galleries, the backyard, the kitchen, but what paintings did we see, and by which artists? Who were the guests at the luncheons? What food did we serve? And furthermore, what was my opinion of those paintings, the guests? What had I been thinking? How did I feel?

And, even worse, I thought with a start, these are the memories I can bring to the surface! What of the hundreds, thousands of moments that have sunk to the floor of my mind, where light cannot reach them? I tried and failed to recall these “in-between” moments. For instance, I attempted to bring forth a memory, any singular memory, of my younger self brushing her teeth. I could not. Then, with growing panic, I tried to remember brushing my teeth yesterday evening. It was recent enough that I knew it had been done, but I could not recollect a single moment of the experience. How could a task that I have repeated twice daily for twenty-four years be impossible to recall?

You are beginning to understand, reader, why I am so thoroughly distressed about this incident, why it has gnawed at my temples for every minute since its occurrence. For it seems to me that our lives are constructed primarily of these in-between moments — the teeth-brushing, the dishwashing, the shoe-tying — and yet, these are the moments our mind most readily relinquishes.

I reached for a scrap of paper and a pen and scrawled several figures, performing a rudimentary sort of calculation. It is true that we sleep for nearly a third of our lives — eight hours a day — but it is assumed that when we are not sleeping, we are in a fully conscious state, one in which we are committing all of our experiences to memory, and this is not true. I estimated that at minimum, four hours of one’s day is spent in this “unknowing” state: getting dressed, bathing, cooking, tidying. That amounts to 12 hours a day, or, multiplied, six months out of the year! Half of one’s life is spent in some state of sleep — and this figure says nothing of the memories that are dulled with time, lodged in the cobwebs of the mind.

An indescribable melancholy washed over me as I mourned my lost moments, my lost time, my lost self. The future is not promised, and God knows one is never truly grounded in the present, try as one might. The past is life’s one certainty, and now, as I was realizing, that too was slipping, had already slipped from my grasp. I felt as though I had been leisurely swimming, only to come up for air to find that the surface of the water had frozen over. The sun was merely a faint haze shining through the ice, and below me, the water hummed indistinct and dark. Panic once again overwhelmed me as I desperately tried to fill my lungs, gripping tightly to the arms of my chair. What is one to do? Is there anything that can be done to prevent this erasure? How is one expected to move forward through life, knowing that every moment is disappearing as quickly as it arrives?

I wrote this to you with the hope that by recounting this incident, transferring it from my mind to the page, I might discover the answer to these questions, but having written up to the present point, I feel as lost and fearful as I did when the thoughts first occurred. Could it be that there simply is no solution? God, what a bleak prospect.

One might suggest documenting one’s experiences, to commit them to memory, and in some way, I am indulging that idea through the act of writing these letters. However, it is not a suitable solution; any significant time from the unknowing state that is regained is lost again in the time that must be put aside to do the writing. One might then suggest that an attempt at diligent mindfulness may aid in preserving one’s memories, but this solution most certainly fails since—

I fear I must leave you here, dear reader. It seems in my panic, my fingernails created a considerable tear in the linen of my armchair, and I must darn the hole; I have guests visiting for dinner tonight, and I must not subject them to the evidence of my stress. I will continue this account — after the mending, and the cooking, serving, hosting, and cleaning, of course.