Time has little meaning to me. Memory doesn’t do that much for me either. The phrase out of sight out of mind is often too true for me. I don’t think of people I don’t see or have the chance to see her often and the times between are just a fugue of indeterminate length. I don’t miss them very often because while I’m know they still exist (object permanence) I have no sense of how much time has past. Like how a dog thinks you’ve been gone forever, except for me it’s you’ve been gone never. Years or hours apart are the same to me, except years feel like hours and not the other way around.
People exist as my strongest memories of them which aren’t always the most recent. Sahar my best friend was the woman who took me in when I needed it and listened to me reading my books aloud while she did things. She’s dead now. I’m never going to see her again, but that doesn’t have as much meaning to me as I feel it should. My grandmother’s who I loved very much are gone too, but it’s hard to feel it.
My twins, who were taken from me as infants, are forever smiling kicking chubby little babies grabbing at each other’s hair, taking toys from each other’s hands and listening to me sing. They’re seven now and very much alive, but I doubt I can see them again. I broke so thoroughly after loosing them that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to recover.
My daughter is almost twenty and I still see her as a four year old, playing with cars, coloring with me and doing puzzles, Calling lunch ‘yunch’, snuggling with me at night. The age I had to leave her with my father. That broke me, too. But not as much because I was already broken and not doing well and that was why I had to leave her. With the twins I was functioning higher than I ever had been before and everything was finally coming together. That’s what made it more devastating.
I feel like I’m just floating through the world sometimes. That it doesn’t make a difference. That nothing makes a difference. That no one does. People are just shadows that turn into dreams and nightmares but more often night mares. Most of them just vaguely exist on the edge of my consciousness until forced into my presence in some way.
I don’t really know how to make that any different. I don’t know how to escape this Fugue of hu man disconnection. I don’t know why I feel so relieved when I’m by myself again, alone, forgetting about everything outside the moment.
My Gordian Knot 