You Blinked & Everything Disappeared

Piecing Together The Truth of a Life You Can't Recall

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There are things you don’t remember at all, but you think everyone else does.
A first kiss. The first date.

And then there are all the things—your life—that you know, in the same way you know about Columbus or the Kennedy assassination, but you don’t actually remember, because you weren’t there.

You can’t remember your life because you weren’t there.
Life, your life, is something you learned.

You remember still photos of events—even when none exist—but not actual events. Memories are two-dimensional, without depth or texture, no nuance or movement. These snapshot “memories” help you identify places and people, but not feelings.

Photos

Not a photo of you wearing it, but proof it existed, that you kept it. Ellie, Miguel, all naked, all drunk, doing as much cocaine as you could wrangle, five of you cuddling on the queen sized mattress on the floor, dancing in your East Village apartment, wearing the blue glitter g-string. That’s what know for sure about the g-string you lost your stage cherry to. You’d wished you’d kept it longer.

Time has to be triangulated¹ using milestones or disasters, then calculated.
Things happened before you got sober, or after; before you left Times Square, or after; before this or after that. A happened before B, but after C and you know that because you wrote A, B, and C down somewhere.

Writing things down made them real in a time when you’d blink and days would disappear; it grounded you in time, in a time when your baggage might have been sitting in the lobby, but you were gone, baby, gone. Checked out.

You’ve kept calendars, date books, phone books, journals, planners, and diaries going back to 4th grade. This is how you know your life, this is how you fact check and confirm. This is what you have to do to remember. To reconstruct your own life, your story.

Flashes

A flashbulb goes off, you see Frankie standing behind the bar. Another flash, he’s in a crowd of young women in the bar. Almost memories, the images of Frankie, duplicates of his image in the naked Polaroids they gave you after his funeral. It’s the only version of his face you can remember, the one in those photos. Proof he existed, he was alive, that you knew him, that you meant something to him, because they gave you those photos once he was dead.

Entries in an old calendar. Proof he was in your life.
Reconstruct your life with him from flashbulb visions, photos, calendars. Frankie isn’t something you remember, he something you know, he’s—your Kennedy assassination.

You’re the audience, not the actor.
Like sitting alone in a dark theater, watching a movie of your life—you see the story, the action, the actors, but you’re not part of it, you’re a voyeur, a stalker in your own life. You are two, one conscious and watching, one going through the motions. Taking notes you won’t remember writing.

What you think you remember, what you call remembering you see from the eyes of that other you, the one sitting in the dark theater, or standing on the balcony looking down at yourself on the street. The other who sits next to you in the cabs, lounges on the couch in the corner and watches from the back side of the looking glass with no reaction. No fear. No feelings.

The other tries to keep you safe, you stumble through the world, blindfolded and numb and the other takes notes.

Even alone in your room, the other stood in the corner, watching and waiting to see what you would do next.

Sometimes you wonder if you made your whole life up. All of it.

Then, ten/twenty/thirty years pass and you run into someone who was there, in that snapshot memory moment and they say, Yes, that’s what happened. Yes, it was exactly like that.

Or they look at you like you’re crazy because they remember it a completely different way.

Or they don’t say anything because they’re not sure either, because maybe they blinked, too.

Dissociation.
Dis-associating.
To not associate.
Separate yourself,
From yourself.

Like daydreaming and driving on autopilot—you get where you were going, but with no memory of getting from here to there. Your mind’s defense when life is too stressful, too confusing, or too much to process.

A balm for survivors of rape, abuse, or war.

Vision

You close your eyes, you’ve floated to the ceiling, you see yourself, on the floor crying. In pain. The you on the floor looks frightened. She should be. It’s not gotten as bad as it’s going to get, the Big Man hasn’t even started to rage yet. A memory? Without any feelings, only presumptions, triangulated assumptions. Feelings happened, you know because years later, you’ll break out in hives again, head to toe, every time you try to talk about it, write about it, remember it. Again. That’s what fear looks like when it has no place to go, it breaks out of where it should have been contained—screaming to the world for help.

You will never ask for help.

You remember when it was over, when you shook it off.

You stay stuck on the ceiling for a long, long time.

Just like being in a drunken blackout, your body sticks around, gets things done, lives through trauma and keeps moving, but your brain has gone all armadillo on you and curled up somewhere safe and a memory of the thing can’t make it through, or doesn’t exist, or exists as bits and pieces that have been run through a paper shredder.

Coming out of it, you try to piece together the shards, create a mosaic of that day or night from what your friends say, who you wake up next to, the fragments scattered around in your head.

You’ve gotten in the habit of playing detective in your own life.

Evidence

In your pocket, an ATM receipt for a $20 withdrawal, as if withdrawing only $20 for drugs will help you limit the amount of drugs you buy and use. There are receipts in every pocket, with the same date stamp, until the time stamp hits midnight, and the date changes but the ATM receipts just keep coming.

You learn how to manage, shrugging comments off, laughing at memories you don’t have, writing things down, taking pictures, making lists. It’s not so bad really, you think, because anything could happen, but you never have to feel any of the bad.

You forget that you don’t feel the good either and you wonder, if you don’t feel either, are there really good and bad feelings, good and bad things?

If the not feeling gets to be too much, too numb—push the envelope. Pierce something. Tattoo something. Live bigger. Faster. The world is filled with contradictions and you try to figure out how to be invisible, but not fade away; to avoid the scary feelings, but not go completely numb; to have love, and not be trapped.

You can’t say when it started. Before you found booze or sex the blink blackouts were a safe place when you felt like you were going to vomit a fireball if you didn’t get out of there, out of your brain, because that’s what anger feels like when it has no place to go. As far back as you can document, you never knew what would happen if you got angry, and it’s no surprise you can’t remember how that started, too little to know to write things down, too little to write anything.

You do remember punching an inflatable Popeye the Sailor Man punching bag as tall as you were, there in maybe a real memory.

You don’t remember slicing the couch cushions and flipping them over so no one would know.

Maybe when you got too big to hide in the closet, your brain was forced to find a new dark place to hide. Like a bottle. Or someone’s bed. And sometimes everything just slipped away and it was as natural as blinking.

The world was here, and then it wasn’t.

They say you remember the things that are important to you. I remember the things that changed me, even if they didn’t seem important at the time.

I remember taking my first hit of cocaine (Hotel Earle, 1976), snorting my first bag of heroin (Paul’s Mardi Gras bathroom, 1981) and turning my first trick (Floyd Simpson, February 1978).

"Quantum physics tells us that no matter how thorough our observation of the present, the (unobserved) past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities.

The universe, according to quantum physics, has no single past, or history. The fact that the past takes no definite form means that observations you make on a system in the present affect its past." - Stephen Hawking

For my father, facts were facts, but truth was subjective, and should never be allowed to get in the way of a good story.

That’s my bloodline, my heritage so, I’m telling you, right up front. You shouldn’t trust me when I speak, when I tell you things face-to-face. I’m early-trained and practically hard-wired for reinvention when I can see your face. Subtly shifting details off your reactions. You might want to stop me now and then and say, wait, what?

Only when I write things down does the truth find its way out.

I’ve kept every date book, calendar, journal, address book, and diary since 4th grade. They’re alive, I visit with them, explore who I was that I don’t remember, what I remember that couldn’t possibly have happened. Without that documentation, I would only exist in this moment.
This moment.
This moment.
This one.

All my life it’s felt as if someone was following behind me with an chalk board eraser, wiping my past away. I aged, the eraser followed me, wiping away who I was, what was true, what wasn’t. It feels like I’ve only been here for a little bit of time.

I’m not a natural born liar, but it’s my inheritance, part of my legacy. It’s epigenetic, like generational trauma.

My father died in 2000. He was 74 years old. Fred’d² turned my old room in the attic into his private den after I moved out in ‘79. The walls were painted federal penitentiary jumpsuit orange.

After the funeral, my mother and I began cleaning out that room. There wasn’t much: a couch, a desk, a word processor, and a bookcase—one shelf filled entirely with date books. Decades, lined up in chronological order. There’d been a dozen different jobs: photographer, hypnotherapist, driving instructor, salesman for a stewardess training program—something he’d seen advertised on a matchbook cover—telephone sales for telephone systems. But when he died, it’d been years since he’d held any job, so why keep all those date books?

We pulled them off the shelves at random and skimmed through. Some had only a single entry for an entire year, something mundane like a doctor’s appointment. He bought a fresh date book each year until he died, even when there was nothing to write down. Like me, he recorded his existence, tangible proof he’d had a life. Like me, he wrote everything down, even things you wouldn’t think you’d worry about forgetting.

On their wedding date in 1955, he’d written: Marry Elayne. It was one of those amusing family stories that got trotted out whenever someone new showed up at a holiday dinner.

When his mother—my Nana—died years earlier, and we’d cleaned up her stuff, we found a dozen almost-empty address books—the 4”x6” stapled paper kind every home got free each year from the phone company, along with your Yellow & White Pages delivery. Nana’d use them as journals, recording the same thing in each one, and saving them all: who she was; where she came from; where she lived and had lived; whom she’d married, when, and the date she’d officially outlived each of her two husbands.

A dozen paper address books with no addresses.
A shelf of date books with barely any appointments.
Two generations finding a way to say the same thing: I exist. I was here.

Me. Every date book, calendar, journal, address book, and diary.
Can you see me now?

If you know what I’m talking about,
sometimes find yourself struggling with truth vs fact,
or have memories you don’t trust—I’d really love to hear about it.

Sometimes, I feel like it’s just me, but that can’t be right.
You can comment, or message me directly. ❤️‍🩹

If you want to know more about how memory works, or in my case, how it doesn’t, I recommend Why We Remember - Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to What Matters by Charan Ranganath. You can get order it from your library, or buy it at my bookshop.org

➡️ PS: If you found this interesting, please consider restacking it or sharing it with your people?

1. If one side and two angles of a triangle are known, the other two sides and angle of that triangle can be calculated.

2. That’d be my dead Dad, Fred.