drag path

I am three years old, making a dance routine on the carpet of my daycare. l scamper down the blue rubber steps that look like Legos to the playground. It’s the first time I notice that I’m getting too big for the little plastic tree dome on the baby side of the fence. It’s uncomfortable, but I squeeze in anyway. By next year, I’ll barely fit in the ball pit and I’ll have to crouch to get into the play stores. In June, we’ll get on the bus to the water park and have worms in dirt and I’ll feel happy until I remember that I won’t have this next year. I feel change coming in the air like a summer breeze and I feel wistful. One day I won’t fit in my little plastic tree, but today is not that day. Today I will be stubborn and squeeze myself in.

I am four and I’m scared of the dark. I keep the light on in my room and open the window so I can hear the crickets and let the heat out. One of my parents sits in the chair facing my bed, watching me fall asleep, but they give up too soon and I go to sleep on my sister’s floor. I climb in her bed when my back hurts. Her twin is getting too small for both of us and she groans. I will do this for several years until one night, which will be my last night and I won’t know it. My cutoff will be dictated by the size of her bed and her desire for privacy, which doesn’t mean much to me at the time. I have a nightmare I will remember for the rest of my life, where I can’t feel her in the bed next to me and suddenly something pinches me and I turn around to see a grinning monster. One day she will move out when I’m in high school and get married while I’m in college, but tonight I am comforted by our closeness and our matching pink and purple PJs.

I am five. I go to the DVD cabinet in search of Thumbelina: A Magical Story, only to find it missing. My mother tells me matter-of-factly that she threw it away because she couldn’t stand hearing the little girl’s voice on repeat. My mother is not unkind, but she does love her facts, and in this case that facts are that Thumbelina’s voice is annoying and I’ve watched it a hundred times. She is simultaneously the most and least sympathetic person I know. Sixteen years later, I start collecting DVDs of my own. I tell her she’s paying to replace Thumbelina. She screams in protest, but I steal her credit card info and buy it on eBay. I don’t care; justice is justice. I put it in the player to show my college friends, knowing it will never be the same. Their reactions will warp my perspective as I watch. I enjoy it still, mostly for the past life it represents. It lives on in my collection as an echo of something that once meant something, a relic my little hands once held close.

I am six, carrying around a teddy bear half my size named Stuffy Fluffy. He belonged to my mom, given to her by some boyfriend many years ago. He and I and my best friend Precious have been inseparable this year, first grade. He is soft and understanding, and Precious is funny and creative. She can be annoying, but so can I. The three of us make a great team. I carry him across the recess yard, to class, through before and after-school programs. One fatal afternoon, I do something horrible that I will take to my grave, proof that one split-second decision can change the trajectory of my life forever. I am on the edge of the pool at a hotel where my parents and I are staying for a reason I never knew or don’t remember, holding Stuffy Fluffy by the arm. I tell my mom I want to take him to swim with me–my buddy, in the pool with me, how fun? She tells me not to, but I feel the impulse like the jumpstart of a motor and I jump in, fur and all. The devastation when I find out about the irreversible damage to chlorinated stuffed animals is unimaginable. I sob and plead with my parents to at least try putting him in the dryer, but they shake their heads and say something about mold and the consequences of my actions. You’d think that a lesson so devastating would make me listen to them more, but somehow I only become more strong-willed–then again, I often think their wisdom peaked that day. Regret, along with guilt and jealousy, will prove to be one of the most difficult emotions for me to cope with, and this incident is the mother of all my life’s regret. Every so often I remember, and every so often I feel it like a knife in the gut. If I could have just rewound one second, if only I had listened, if I could just go back, if only, if only… I’ve become sentimental about a couple stuffed animals in the past few years, but Stuffy Fluffy could have been a lifelong friend. So could Precious, who moved away shortly after this and whose loss I feel almost as much. I feel this memory like the original sin, and I wonder if he was truly as soft as I remember. I wonder if saving him would really have saved me. If given a single moment of my life to go back and change, I’d choose this one in a heartbeat.

I am seven years old. I am sitting with my parents and my sister in Adirondack chairs on the top of a hill above the lake where we’ve spent nearly all of my summers, where I saved a snapping turtle and learned to love the lilacs. My parents are telling me that I’ve had my last summer here and I didn’t know it. I find out shortly after that there will be no fall festival at school this year, no more roasting marshmallows on a farm or pulling lollipops in the gym or going through the haunted house in the music room. I am distraught and I wonder if my life will be a series of last times without knowing it.

I am eight and having an existential crisis. I draw circles in the blacktop on the recess yard with a small rock and tell my classmates what I’ve recently come to understand: that our parents and everyone we love will die at some point, never ever to return and there’s nothing we can do about it. They yell at me to stop, tell me that I’m freaking them out. I nod, mildly confused, and retreat back into my mind. I’m freaked out too. I can’t go too long thinking about the nothingness and non-being waiting for me without feeling nauseous, but I can’t help it. I keep imagining a black void that is also somehow a vast and infinite galaxy, the place I envision my consciousness going for eternity. The dying is not as bad as the non-being, the non-thinking. Anything but that. The spiral only stops eventually–I don’t remember how many months or years it takes–when I dare to imagine something I don’t really believe: a reality where people become stars at the end of their lives, forever gazing down upon Earth and the rest of the universe as it unfolds like a really long movie.

I am nine at a school running event, admiring the way that a spring shower has made the fields glow bright green. I am acutely aware that this outlook will slip away and I try to hold on to it. I can never describe the way certain details or moments can shift my perspective of the world as a whole, and I feel frustrated. I will spend my entire life trying to capture these moments, these eras and perspectives, like universes in a bottle. Sometimes they will come about violently, like when I’m driving and the sunlight hits the leaves in just the right way and my sense of reality is reverted to a specific spring feeling I had six years ago and I realize I can see the world from a different angle and I’m not really in control of it as much as I want to be. Other times, I spend a great deal of time trying to invoke these shifts–like when I’m making a playlist over and over to try and encapsulate the specific scene of when my room was all wooden and candles and my soundtrack was The Fray’s How to Save a Life throughout fall that turned into Mumford & Sons’ Babel winter. As I run across the field in my pink skort to meet my parents, I daydream about inventing something where you can airdrop a folder of experiential information from your brain to someone else’s, whereupon they can instantly understand what you see and feel as you perceive it.

I am ten, getting ready to play manhunt at a friend’s house. I look around at my fifth grade friend group and feel an indescribable pang of pain, like I suddenly have everything I want–a stable friend group, everyone hanging out together–and I know it won’t last because it can’t. The harder I try to really appreciate a moment, the faster the experience slips through my fingertips. I want to verbalize how much this night means to me, but I know from experience that they’ll just look at me like I’m insane. It’s always the same: I get so caught up in trying to burn it into my brain, repeating over and over again in my mind that this will be gone and I need to experience it to the fullest. Then I blink and suddenly it’s sixth grade, and my friends are gone before I even have the chance.

I am eleven, getting ready for my first year as a real camper at a new camp that will become the only one that ever mattered. I need to stop sucking my thumb. They’ve tried everything, from counseling to hand sanitizer, but I am resistant. I want to stop, but there is no AA for fifth-grade thumb-suckers, and I just can’t seem to kick the habit. It feels like a great moral failure for which I have a lot of shame. I have learned to hide it under my hands in class, even though everyone knows what I’m doing anyway. I’m only able to muster up enough self-discipline to quit cold turkey when I realize I won’t be able to hide it at camp and am desperate not to suffer the social repercussions. This oral fixation will never really go away, but will be replaced instead by food and vapes and eventually, the occasional cigarette.

I am twelve, stepping out onto the sidewalk for dismissal from my elementary school for the final time. I am sobbing uncontrollably, my lungs sputtering under a weight much heavier than my backpack and despair far too big for my body. I collapse into the arms of my fifth grade math teacher, soaking her shirt. She wasn’t particularly my favorite, but she’s there and I appreciate that. Other kids on their way out regard me with utter bewilderment. Some laugh, but I don’t care. I think I must know something they don’t–possess an awareness of grief and loss of time that usually comes later in life. I am just as young, but not as carefree. I stare at them skipping off through blurry eyes, wishing that on that final bell, I too could have thought only of the excitement of summer and not the crushing dread of never-agains.

I am thirteen. My favorite older camper has left, never to return. I think I was in love with her, or maybe in limerence. I lock myself in my dad’s office and refuse to come out for meals. I hyperventilate, feeling like half of me left in her family van back to Tampa and the other half is empty. My parents take me to a hotel for inter-session break, but all I can feel is existential nausea and dread. I wonder what’s wrong with me. I attach to other people at camp as the years go on, but I never quite recover from that feeling of perversion and emptiness. I hate the last day of camp when we say our goodbyes, and I hate being a staff member’s kid, because I’m always the last one left. I’m the one that has to watch them leave. With nothing else to do, I wander the grounds in liminal quiet while leadership busy themselves preparing for the next set of campers. To them, it’s a transition. To me, it’s the end of all things. Maybe there’s a reason why all of my report cards and write-ups going back to preschool say “trouble with transitions”. Maybe, just maybe, I’m not yet done with what I’ve got. Maybe I want to stay put. Maybe things haven’t reached fruition yet. Maybe I don’t want to be jerked around from thing to thing, group to group. Maybe I want to build something. Maybe I’m not ready to move on.

I am fourteen and it’s my bat mitzvah. I’m extremely perfectionistic about which tables get which musical artist. I’m at my most angsty and existential, which makes sense. As awful as everything is, I am the closest I may ever be to expressing the raw emotion and spirit within me through playlists, poetry, art, Tumblr posts, and various other interest explorations. My camp counselor gifts me a big book on stars, which fills me with indescribable emotion. I fall asleep to Pink Sands candles and Robbers by The 1975, imagining myself drifting over city highways and falling through space. I wonder why I think and feel so deeply and why I can’t seem to put it into words. In time, the tight-knit emo friend group that went up to light a candle to that song will dissolve into toxic and tumultuous relationships characteristic of its members. All I can do is worry about what’s broken inside of me and dream of some distant future where I feel whole, but it hurts so good. In ten years, I will want nothing but this era and version of myself back, passion bursting at the seams, all spilling over and reckless.

I am fifteen. I start doing work with social justice groups in my area, propped up by a lovely network of supportive adults. I throw myself into more and more work like a machine, never letting myself feel the weight of burnout and taking pride in doing as much as I can. I am in more worlds than I have feet, fingers, and toes; I wear myself thin, anxious to maximize my many potentials. I continue to disappear under the weight of all my trades. My ninth grade advisor warns me to slow down, but I ignore him. I know he is right and it terrifies me, but there is no other choice. These things must be done. Suddenly it’s all gone, everyone has moved away, and I’m in a state of denial. The people at my new school have no idea what I can do, and I can’t muster up the energy to show them. I reach out to groups back home but get no response. I feel like a pet mascot that has outgrown its cuteness, utterly disposable. Nothing could have prepared me for how fast everything and everyone disappears. Or how similar having everything and having nothing feel in their respective moments.

I am sixteen, the age from the song sung at campfires about how regrettably fast life goes. It’s the end of my last day as a camper, a day I’ve dreaded since the moment I set foot on the fallen pine needles by the gate at the top of the hill. The Visiting Day lunch has ended, but the rotten smell of fancy salmon and goodbyes torn from my chest still fills the air around the dining hall. It makes me sick, and I hold my stomach as I walk up the gravel to the archery range. It feels like I am dying. I think of the sentiments often shared that such feelings only represent good times had and lives well-lived. These offer no comfort as I sit in the rain by the empty soccer field clutching my ribs, wondering how a body can hold this much grief without breaking. I am baffled by the ability of everyone around me to take these things in stride and keep going, while I feel like I’ve been shot straight through the chest. My only solace is in the abundance of my tears. This isn’t a given, as I can recall many times that I desperately wanted release or to show that others’ open grief was also happening inside of me but couldn’t--that may be the only feeling worse than this. But they flow freely down my face and into my stomach, where they twist and pull on my insides and whisper Never again, Never again, Never again.

I am 20 and I am in Hell. I’ve arrived at school in California to pursue environmental justice, and I have never experienced such psychosis. My transition has been so traumatic that I’ve lost my memories, like I entered the Twilight Zone via plane and left my soul in another dimension. I try desperately to cling to my before, but it dematerializes upon contact. I can answer questions about my other self because I know the answers, but it takes a heavy and specific reminder to remember any details about what I did and who I was before I got here. My history is now recall-only; my memories and experiences are no longer held like archives that can float off the shelf, keeping me tethered to some semblance of self. I am completely de-contexualized at the very moment I need it the most. I am like a fish out of water. A shell. It truly is what I imagine living without a soul or spirit is like. I don’t recognize myself in my thoughts, in conversations, or in the mirror. I claw from behind glass as I watch my reality slip into nothing and dissociate for the next two years until I transfer back to the northeast. I continue to ponder if the dissociative amnesia was California’s fault or if the gutting denial of change would have followed me anywhere.

It is my 21st birthday. I lie in my girlfriend’s arms in my sophomore apartment bed, taking a beat before we go off to our favorite club to celebrate. I feel like I was sixteen yesterday, like I was in a coma and have just now woken to find that everyone and everything I knew has gone and moved on while I lost five years of my life to sleep. Between sobs, I tell her that I know everyone feels like their life has gone by in a flash, but for me it feels so much worse than described–like someone else lived it. Like I wasn’t there. Like I died years ago and woke up here, in this bed. I am mostly incomprehensible, but one phrase reverberates in the air and in my mind: Lost time. We go to the club and I get a huge fishbowl drink for free and go up on stage for the birthday song and amidst the backtrack of unbearable sorrow, we have a good time. I fight back tears as I sign my first legal drink receipt, so my birthday picture leaves something to be desired. The world keeps turning and I keep on moving, somehow. Somehow.

I am 22 in Ecuador, on my hands and knees crawling upstream, refusing to let the river take me as sediment. I choke on my own stubbornness. The current whisks me down in one terrifying moment and I smash my big toe going over a rock. It is dangerous and exhilarating. I have just broken up with a girl I have known and loved longer than anyone before, and I’m desperate for a sign that I’ll survive carving my own heart out of my chest. I settle into an alcove where the water takes a strong, smooth form rushing over the rocks in the middle of the current and I rest my head against a boulder, wrapping my arms around it and feeling the resistance as the water tension breaks over my fingertips. I see myself in this persistent and creative force. I know that my options are to surrender or be whisked away, move or be moved. Deep down, I know these are the only choices, and the result is the same. But I rest here for a while, using my strength and energy to cling on, never more alive than when I feel the force of the current resisting my body placed stubbornly in its path.

I am 23 years old. I come home for spring break two months before graduation to find my father has changed all the tables and chairs and moved the pictures on the walls again, indicative of a permanent dissatisfaction so lovingly passed on. I go to the driveway to clean my car, my beautiful blue freedom, and think of all the times he has tried to bribe me to sell it. I think of all of the fights and the grieving in advance. He can’t stand the idea of something well-lived, well-used, and well-risked–to him, the body and mind are to be preserved in a museum. Since I saved up for it on my gap year, he has always been there to remind me that one day soon that will be gone, too.

It’s a wonder I can remember any of this at all, with my clenched fists and fading out. In everything I feel the pulse, the urgency of the need to give in to the constant shifts and rugs-pulled-under. Is there something wrong with me that I am destined to live a life of never coping with never-agains, always feeling ripped and torn? I love the seasons, and I feel even those are too short. I respect that all being exists through cyclical change; I accepted the impermanence of life long ago. But why must it always be a tearing? A severance? It is me, or is it this strange universe that is truly lacking in the art of transition?

I want to wrap my arms around this big blue planet and dig my heels into the dirt to stop it from spinning. I imagine the violence of being dragged along, the blood-drenched soil from the rock fragments and splinters tearing through my toenails as I try desperately and futilely to resist. I am both hurled along and being passed by. I am running out of time to slow down. I am flung into space at rocket ship speed with one impossible wish: to fall gracefully, so that I may witness comets crossing paths nearby. But I am tethered into orbit by the sheer intensity of my own gravity, so I may never see the stars. I am a supernova sighing with the weight of the universe collapsing in on itself, never to witness the beauty it creates.

I am moments disappearing from memory, a life lived in retrospect, with all the soft vibrance of a smiling photograph in a forgotten album fading to oblivion in the corner of a vintage store. I am the photographer, the book, and the keeper. The photograph is of me, yet I am not the subject, for the moment captured was not my experience. I am merely its ghost, wandering the dusty shelves and powerless to do all but witness the decay of a record of a life not quite lived.