The World That's Coming

I have a terrible memory at times.

That’s clearly not always true; there are people, places, events that I’ve lived through that live on inside my head in, at times, shocking fidelity despite happening decades earlier, things that I can see with such clarity right now even though it’s been years since I last thought of them. On some things, my memory is amazing. On others, though…?

I don’t mean this in the sense of not remembering people’s names when they’re introduced —although, yes, that, too — or misremembering the details of a story when retelling it. That’s just an everyday, shared experience, I think, the mistakes all of us make because our brains work the way they work. Yes, that’s a memory thing, but everyone has this version of memory, surely…? This isn’t the failure of my memory I’m talking about.

No, I’m talking about my constant surprise at things that not only happen on a recurring basis, but which I know enough to be able to predict. I’m talking about forgetting about the weather.

We had the first full flush of heat this year, recently. It had been teased for weeks, it felt like; the sun vanquishing the clouds in the sky, the temperature going to a level I’ll call “nice enough to ditch the sweater” but no further. It was clear that it was only a matter of time before things actually got hot. The weather forecast was checked over and over, and eventually the big day arrived… and I was surprised.

I wasn’t surprised by the heat per se; I was surprised by how it felt. Despite the fact that every single year this happens, I was surprised by how tired I feel when it’s hot, how the very air feels just that little bit thicker and more difficult to exist it, that little bit more draining. (This sounds particularly dramatic, I know; I’m overstating it to a degree, but I do wilt in warm weather for some reason. I blame my Scottish DNA.)

Like I said, this happens every year, and I know this. Every single year, summer is going to arrive and in a manner more literal than the Rock catchphrase that it sounds like, it’s going to bring the heat. Yet, each year when it does happen, it’s a surprise, somehow. I’m unprepared, and ultimately, unhappy for the crossover.

As I seem to remember saying, I really do have a terrible memory at times.

When all of this started, I remember clearly thinking to myself that I didn’t want to normalize the lockdown, the quarantine, sheltering in place, any of it. It felt strange for everything to be closed, for the outside world to be so still while the inside one was so chaotic — more people here now, all the time, and one of them is seven years old and loud — and I promised myself that I would try my best to remember that this was an aberration, a break from the norm, instead of the “new normal,” whatever that may mean.

By now, I’m having trouble remembering what life was like before plaguetimes hit.

In my defense, it’s been two months now, a figure that seems difficult to fully comprehend because, as many have pointed out, time feels elastic and meaningless in a number of ways. At some point a couple of weeks ago, I realized that I’d genuinely forgotten how long we’d been in lockdown — I was trying to count the weeks and failing, eventually coming up with a figure of “eight, maybe nine weeks, perhaps it’s seven.” The confusion felt correct in some inexplicable manner. (It was the eighth week, for those wondering.)

I can remember everything from before the shutdown in an abstract way, of course, as a series of “we used to…”s — we used to go out to dinner, we used to go to the movies, we used to go to the grocery store and it was fun and not an existential terror ride where you don’t even want to squeeze past the person blocking the aisle because they can’t decide what kind of pasta they want and why aren’t they even wearing a mask, what the hell is this…?!? That kind of thing. I can remember the shape, but not the color, the way it actually felt. That feels important, to have lost that memory.

And, again, it’s been two months. An indistinct number of weeks. Of course things are going from memory like that. This is the new normal now, just as whatever comes next, whatever unusual world will come post-lockdown, will be a new new normal; you can’t fight it, not really. But there’s something sad to me about what I’ve lost along the way, and will likely never get back.