Trying to Go Home Again

The story of how I remembered everything before I forgot.

I used to believe that hard work would result in recognition and success, that sadness was fleeting and transitory, and that happiness was universal, enjoyed on a whim.  I used to believe that prayer and a small measure of faith could change the world.  I was all of nine years old, and I believed in many too-good-to-be-true things, if only out of ignorance and a lack of introspection.

But time grinds slowly forward from one moment to the next, and the days turned into weeks and the months turned into years.  I was offered up endless evidence that would challenge and ridicule my pre-pubescent beliefs.  Hard work could amount to nothing and sadness could persist.  Prayer and faith were luxuries afforded to those fortunate enough to avoid such troubles, or to those so deeply troubled that they simply couldn’t resist.

And so I became a young man deeply skeptical of my world and its most heavily-trafficked myths.  I asked questions and demanded answers.  All that was sacred was made profane, and everything that I once knew slowly melted into the air, swirling, rising, and eventually fading from view.  And on a cold November afternoon I became my father’s son, the son of a man who suddenly no longer existed, and whose death could never be discussed.

The foundation upon which a well-adjusted teenager sits is remarkably tenuous.  Without it, I was swallowed whole into the ether of confusion, resentment, and despair.  Everything lost meaning, and I filled myself with a pulsating emptiness that I let wash over me, like waves along the edges of the beach, each one leaving an indistinct mark on the shifting sand.  Soon the water had finally spilled over me (or perhaps I waded deeper), and the marks on my beach slowly flattened and soon it looked like nobody had ever even been there at all.

Pain is a very selfish sensation.  The same pain that consumed me, alone in my solitude, was the same pain that I could never fully share.  That pain was mine.  It belonged to me—I had clearly earned it and it was all I had to cling to.  The idea of suffering became a comforting blanket that I wrapped tightly around myself, oddly convinced that it could somehow make me warmer.  It didn’t, but I persisted with my conviction and soldiered deeper into the darkness.

Everything that had ever hurt me was delicately sewn into a quilted patchwork that I greedily protected.  That patchwork became my identity; a lens through which I viewed the world, and through which I would let the world view me.  I became a cautionary tale to be reflected upon by people who, with a small measure of luck, would never see the world the way I had come to.  And so I would sew the next patch into my little blanket of hurt, always just needing a little more thread.

But life does not proceed along at a steady march so much as it nervously slips from one moment to the next.  I made a lot of mistakes.  My protective quilt grew heavier by the day, and the days turned into weeks and the months turned into years.  My sewing became more erratic and the patchwork of my life was falling apart at the seams.  I had surrounded myself with people just as troubled as myself, and we self-styled ourselves as beautiful losers, because you work with what you have.  I gave voice to that noblest of lies: pretending that there is beauty to be found in the darkest corners of your mind. There isn’t.

I look back now with judgement and resignation, and I see just how many of my friends didn’t make it out alive. We add a new name every year.  I can see it all now for how ugly it was.  And I’m consumed by overwhelming feelings of disgust and regret, anger and empathy.  My life is empty now of these people, by both circumstance and design.  I miss their laughter, but not so much them, because I still vaguely remember how everything went wrong.  Nothing I can recall deserves a celebration and is probably best forgotten.

There is always time for decisions and revisions.  A life can be constructed and then torn down.  It can also be re-negotiated and imagined anew.  The process is often accidental and it is always very tenuous.  It happens not so much out of deliberate design but through a slow, tedious process of deciding to live for just one more day.  A life is then measured out slowly in coffee spoons, a predictable grind that provides you with enough consecutive days of routine existence.

I’ve ended up living for a lot of days.  The days turned into weeks, and months turned into years.  I’m sure some people lost bets on my longevity, although in fairness even I knew well enough to hedge my all my position.  I spent many years living in university libraries and lecture halls.  I filled my own emptiness with the words of fellow travelers who had looked into the void and decided that they much preferred their hell with other people.  Many cups of coffee were poured with the sort of people who dared to imagine that Sisyphus could somehow be happy, if not terribly bored.

I became an intellectually enriched person with some measure of emotional depth.  I could endlessly contextualize my experiences and explain away the ghosts that never stopped visiting me.  It became a little bit easier to breathe and it hurt a little bit less, just so long as I kept one step ahead of myself and seldom looked back.  If I missed even one step I could find myself backtracking and regressing, surveying the wreckage of an old life that I had never really managed to distance myself from.

There have been many long nights where I’ve lost that step, and have spiraled into that familiar place of emptiness and despair.  Many nights where I didn’t particularly care to see the morning’s rising sun.  And there is a war inside of me, between what is most strong and what is most weak.  A war between the part of me that wants to disappear and be forgotten, and the part that has overcome too much to give up now.  I am weak enough to want to surrender to the night, yet strong enough to make it through to the dawn.  I am human, all-too-human.

The internal war has gone on forever and has created a messy, blurred portrait of a complicated existence.  I have no single, stable identity—no clear idea of who I am from one day to the next.  There is just me, locked in my own mind, conducting an investigation at a contaminated crime scene.   My memories and emotions are recklessly scattered about.  I am an unreliable witness to my own life.  

Perhaps this is what scares me the most, that I am simply unable to be an honest witness to my time and place.  All of my experiences are coloured by my own deficient neurochemical stew, made up of yesterday’s ingredients and given a little too much time to simmer.  When I look out at the world and my place within it, I am deeply suspicious of everything I see.  I don’t trust my own senses, and I certainly don’t fully trust the narrative my life is built upon.

Socrates famously—and likely with a smirk—exhorted us to know ourselves.  Yet to search for a single, stable identity is akin to chasing one’s shadow.  Identity is a dynamic construct, it is imagined and assumed from one moment to the next, stretching and bending.  And so there are two things that I know for certain: you can never truly know yourself, and you can’t go home again—certainly not to whatever remains of your family or your childhood.

There is so much of my life that has been imagined that sometimes I confuse it for things that I have lived.  So much of the world exists within our heads and has no escape into objective reality.  I feel such a deep connection to the idea of myself as a child, and I remember that he is very scared and in need of help.  But I am unable to go back to help him now.  Too much time has passed, and I have forgotten where to find him.