Harpreet Kaur

 

Disappearing Again

The world doesn't disappear when we close our eyes. I must believe in a world outside my mind, where my actions still have meaning, where they aren't an image produced by my brain cells conjured entirely from memory's imagination.

If I have no memory of my childhood; does it not exist?

Science and philosophy have joined bodies in my head, like Siamese twins. I don't know which ideologies belong to who or how to separate one from the other. Venn diagrams, they called them in school. Venn diagrams were easier to understand a decade ago when each circle had its assigned name and the overlapped area was usually shaded or dotted to show 8-year-old minds the difference. And there were only 2 circles producing a singular gray area, nothing more. Ten years later, I am growing dizzy walking in circles over gray areas covering metaphoric miles that lead me back to nowhere.

Memory is an interpretation, not a record. Salvador Dali insisted on the persistence of memory. His melted watches are nothing else but the Camembert cheese of space and time; tender, outlandish, solitary and critical-paranoiac. In desolate, warm landscapes, the perception of time and space and the behavior of the memories acquire soft forms that adjust themselves to the circumstances. Time loses its meaning. How do I heal if I cannot feel time? How can I rely on memory that is so subjective?

You wake up in a room, you don't know how you got there. The bed is queen-sized and there is no one next to you. The duvet is on the floor, the curtains are drawn. When did you do that? Don't know. The room smells of stagnancy, of stale yesterdays. You don't know how long you've been here. There is a map pasted on the wall with Polaroid pictures blue-tacked along the border, pictures of people, of places next to nouns written in capital letters. The handwriting. Is it yours? Don't know. Stacks of videotapes titled 'Watch this first', volume one to five. Whose are they? In the mirror is a man, that must be how you look like. That is your hair, your skin, your body. It must be, but is it? Don't know. You could be female but the mirror says otherwise. Maybe someone placed your memoryless brain inside a stranger's body and now you are forced to accept it as your own because that's what the mirror says. The mirror doesn't lie - does it?

I am considering the possibility that I have no memory. The law of thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed and is converted from one form to another. If memory is an energy source, its disappearance must result in the subsequent creation of a vacuum. Hence, the energy of the universe is kept constant but personal disequilibrium is the inevitable result.

Is it worth it? You would say I ask too many questions and give too few satisfactory answers. You would say I am trying too hard to convince, that these hypotheses are irrational. I would believe you and the next day feed another virgin sheet into my old typewriter and roll it up. I will replace question marks with full stops but still - I would be trying too hard to convince. The truth is, we are all looking for someone to convince so it wouldn't seem like we are the only ones who believe in what we believe. I know I am.

The world doesn't just disappear when you close your eyes, does it? Maybe I'll take a photograph to remind myself.

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