sometimes moments feel like illicit endings. not necessarily a death sentence, but as though the credits will momentarily roll across the screen and the movie will cease. the members of the audience will get up and return to their regularly scheduled lives. sometimes i wish i could be one of those audience members, though i never became a regular subscriber to escapism until my late teens.
these endings begin, for the most part, with me finding a way to drive myself mad. asking myself questions that i’ll never have the answers to. on that particularly fatigued thursday, i forgot my second grade teacher’s name. for anyone else, this would’ve meant nothing. however, for someone whose pride came from the fact that i’ve always been coined as “wise beyond my years”, i took this new sensation of feeling lost as a personal insult. i always toyed with the thought of becoming so out of touch with my childhood that i could no longer remember their names because it seemed too obscure to ever happen. until it did. it was one of the few times where real life felt like a movie, but never the type i’d gushed over in my youth- the type where i was still the main character and immune to life’s bravado.
and before i knew it, i’d forgotten how to breathe. forgotten the title of the dr. seuss book my grandma would read over and over until mine and my brother’s laughter lulled us to sleep. forgotten the sensation of my lungs burning after seeing which of my friends could stay underwater the longest, even though our parents told us not to. forgotten the name of the road with the giant hill that my dad would call a “belly-grabber”. forgotten how it felt to hold in a laugh when my friends and i pretended to fall asleep in each other’s beds so our parents would be forced to let us stay over, no matter how many times it didn’t work. forgotten how eternal summer nights felt when the air turned oppressive and our only duties were spying on the boys of the cul-de-sac and discovering more secret hiding places than the day before. forgotten how miraculous the grass turning green after months of it poking my bare feet while running across it seemed. forgotten what it was like to not compare how i looked with every passerby; to simply throw on an outfit and leave the house just because. forgotten how it felt when i thought i ruled the world after staying up past midnight for the first time. forgotten how goddamn alive it was possible to feel.
sometimes i become jealous of myself. of how sparkly things look from a distance. of a time when i didn’t feel too young to be a woman but too old to be a girl, and for five minutes i tell myself that i’ll commit to living in the moment. i put my phone down and take a mental picture of the sky because that’s supposed to be better than anything technology could do.
maybe memories are supposed to be hazy enough so that only the brightest colors can bleed through. i’m not sure. it’s funny, though. you wish away time only to despise the future you were hopeful for. i’m sure there’s a lesson in there somewhere. i just haven’t learned it yet.