My biggest fear is forgetting my own life.
The idea that things I once gave so much attention could cease to exist, culled neural pathways swept into the furnace of the mind. I used to despair about such things–I’m someone who lies awake at night, choking on thoughts instead of sleeping. But I’ve discovered a solution through materialising the ephemeral.
I collect things and sort them neatly, year on year. Any time I want, I can slip comfortably into the waters of my old selves, I exercise my memory to make sure it’s still there. Everything in its place. If you look under my bed there is a strange assortment of vessels:
An oblong white box: year twelve. The plastic golden trophy I got from my history teacher. Photobooth strips from my ex’s work Christmas party. My VCE results letter–the envelope ravaged, desperation immortalised.
A vintage biscuit tin commemorating Wimbledon: my Europe trip. The smell of my perfume that year, blessings from the Virgin Mary at Montserrat, a paper bag from Shakespeare & Company containing all of the postcards I bought at museums but could never part with.
A larger box with decoupage peeling at the edges: second year of university. The water bottle I was given by that guy from my favourite band, gumnuts from a morning walk on Easter weekend, the photobooth strip documenting my first kiss with my boyfriend.
A tall thin tin with a chicken pressed into the side: every birthday card I’ve ever received. Echoes of myself throughout the years–who I am, reflected back at me through the words of others. A ‘sweetheart’ to someone at some time.
There is no sense organ for time, no objective linearity to it, only the structure imposed by the brain. We make sense of things as humans out of inclination, I certainly do. My brain tries to put my past into neat little boxes under my bed–labelled with pastel coloured paper and silver Sharpie.
As we age, time loses its elasticity. Like our skin, it wrinkles and crepes, losing things beneath the folds of days and hours. This can be attributed to a few things.
Predictability shrinks time, just as constant chaos seems to render its linearity impotent. I find that my brain needs something to hold onto, an anchor point of novelty or nostalgia. When our lives become monotonous increments, there are fewer mental time-stamps to cling onto for buoyancy. We can drown in the formlessness.
We paid more attention to everything when we were kids, which I view as a perfect combination of heightened wonder and lack of algorithmic spoon-feeding. We aren’t forced to pay attention anymore. By creating a memory box to fill each year, I force myself to stop and notice the objects surrounding key memories. I have to think to myself: is this a memento? Should I save it for my box? Can I attach a memory to it and use it to unspool the tight coil of time?
When I open the boxes and run my hands over their contents, time feels like it did when I was a kid–slow-moving and filled to the brim.
It is through these boxes that I can construct and archive my sense of self, that I can imagine time as a web of all these events, happening sequentially but also over and over again. Each time I open a box after a long period, I get to travel back.
I’ve moved around a lot recently. The boxes lived not under my bed, but in a storage unit resting under a stack of dining chairs. I unpacked them properly last week and opened every single box, one after the other. I’ve never felt time hit me from every angle like that. Suddenly, I remembered myself.
At times over the past few months, my life has felt somewhat transient. As if I’m slipping in and out of the regular timeline, and not creating new memories as quickly as I could before. When you don’t have something to anchor you, a representation of yourself to return to, you lose a sense of who that is supposed to be. You forget. And I like who I’ve been and who I am. I don’t wish to lose her to time. And so I reopen time, unspool it and wrap it around myself, again and again…