how do you remember?

that's easy. i can't forget.

every morning presents a border between dreams and the rest of the world.

wake up. there’s a hazy grey sunrise teasing you out the window. there’s an option to silence your alarm. if you’re lucky, you get a few moments, maybe all the way to the bathroom, before the pain slices through your body like a disaffected knife. it doesn’t help when the dentist says little pinch or the bottle of antibiotics tells you there may be side effects or someone says i wish you all the best, but—. better that the knife should be clinical, not care about what it’s doing. better that the stark white tile and too-tall sinks in your childhood house should sit placidly like they always do, unbothered by your grief and unmoving in the face of it. you tell the mirror, i am going to make it through this year. you tell it, this is not going to be the rest of my life. worse than the idea that it doesn’t believe you is the immovable truth that it’s a mirror and doesn’t care either way.

how do i remember? i blink soft and slow at the question. i wonder whether anyone forgets. my father has told me a hundred times that he likes eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. i watched it years ago. i thought it was a nice fantasy. i would like to believe in a world where you can excavate someone from your mind and leave the place spick and span, nary a sign that they were ever there. that isn’t how it works, is it? even if i removed all the remembrances i’d still pick up the phone with a slurred yello, arden speaking, still get heated over the correct pronunciation of apricot, still recite the plot of six unthinkingly without having seen the musical. in order to remove a single person from my mind i would have to unpick the entire tapestry of my life and leave only the ghost of patterns in their place. in fairness, i have felt like a ghost for ten months straight.

sometimes i think being awake is the real dream. nothing makes sense. the universe is a disjointed series of disconsolate images. i am peering over my own shoulder. i am peering in.

i am always, always remembering. i exist in the past and present at once.

this is not going to be the rest of my life, i told my mirror. there’s one with summery tiles around my reflection in my room, placed a little too high for me to comfortably see myself in it. there’s one in the bathroom but ever since my parents replaced the sinks i have to get on a stool to see myself in it. there’s one at my desk but it’s too small and smudged and when i try to do my makeup in it i always miss a spot on the side of my nose. once when i peered at my eyes i saw gold flowering from the iris and dancing in the deep sea brown. there was a pink fog i kept trying to get past and now that i have there isn’t any colour left. i look closer. my nose is brushing the mirror. my eyes are not golden or hazel or blue, they are brown, and i get the sense very little sits behind the iris. they look flat. dull. sort of lifeless. sometimes i don’t recognize them as mine.

there is a border, between dreams and waking, and it has disappeared for me. on wednesdays i reach out to touch it. nothing is there.

i’d like there to be a moral.

i’d like to write about a different day. whenever i start typing i think i am going to do something interesting and brilliant and instructive, and then i end up circling back to the same day i have been living out, over and over again, for this entire year. it is grey and dull and lifeless. it is a dream with illogical content and intense emotions and snotty sacred sorrows your subconscious subsumes into symbolism so you don’t have to deal with it. except i wake up and deal and keep living the same day, over and over. i miss the days when it still felt like something was going to change. what remains of the past in the most concrete terms is small, dull anticipation, living alongside the plethora of far more destructive bacteria in my gut, holding out for the day to change.

once i told someone i never thought i’d talk about in the past tense that when i met them everything turned to colour and i think when they left it switched back to grey. i never expected that.

in all honesty, i don’t think i’ve ever had it all figured out. i don’t think i’m always right. i think i’m a good talker and it counts for a lot. focus on my hand. focus on my metaphor. focus on how i explain to you that we are not going to work and this is not going to work and pay no attention to the tears running down my face. pay no attention to the grey ghost boys that come in and wreak havoc until i force them out again. pay no attention to my father looming over my shoulder. pay no attention. i am unbiased. i am the lens of a camera. matter of fact, i am alone.

alone is my starting word for wordle. i have a 71% win rate.

there is the border again. it is murky in the light at the office. it is dwindling to pieces under the microscope. i am looking at it and how the majority of people are confident and complacent existing on one side or the other, and i am wondering how anyone lives like that, whether i could live like that too, whether i am consigned to the dream for the rest of my life.

this can’t be all there is.

i can’t be all there is.

this life and the next one. this day and the next one. this year pressing into the back of my neck, daring me, asking how much i think i can take. the conditions of absolute isolated unchanging reality set about my body like bars and close in. i listen to my own thoughts every morning. i listen to them on the train. i listen to them in the dream. they are louder than my music. often they ask me whether this is how to live and whether i think my life is redeemable and whether i think it is worth going on. and although i am often verbalizing the answers to these questions as no the fact that i am still hanging around, writing to you, is perhaps proof that the implicit answer is yes.

you are still young, i whisper. there is still time.

one day i will figure out how to get over the border again.

all my love,
arden.