Everything and Nothing

TW: Themes of suicide

I’m going to try and make you understand. I’ve tried to explain it over the years but I’ve given up because nobody ever understands. So, I’m going to try one last time.

The simplest way to put it is that I can remember my life in greater than average detail. It’s called hyperthymesia, and there are fewer than one hundred people who have been diagnosed with it. I have not been diagnosed, but I know I have it. When I say I remember everything, I mean I remember everything. Everything-everything-everything. I can tell you what I ate on September 15th, 2010 (frozen waffles with milk for breakfast, a ham and swiss sandwich with apple juice and a handful of goldfish crackers for lunch, a blue raspberry freezie after school, fish sticks and tartar sauce, fries and ketchup for supper, and a bowl of chips with a glass of pop for a movie snack while I watched WALL-E for the fifth ever time). I know what you’re thinking: “You’re just making that up! I can make up what I ate twenty years ago too!”. Well, when I was fifteen I told my best friend Sam about it, and she thought the same thing. So I convinced her to keep a journal of all the time we spent together for a year so she could testme. When it had been a year since she started keeping it (November 25th, 2015) she quizzed me. I got every question she asked me right. Every single one.

She was amazed. “You have to tell someone! You could be famous! Maybe you’d end up on Ellen or something!” she said. “This is incredible! Is this why you do so well on tests?”

“No,” I lied. “It doesn’t work like that. It’s more about being able to remember my personal life.” Really, it was exactly why I could do so well on tests. To be honest, I intentionally got some things wrong on tests because I didn’t want to be suspicious. I figured that out when I was eight and my third grade teacher, Mr. Bryant, accused me of cheating on October 3rd, 2008 at 1:22 in the afternoon.

But there’s more, and this is where I lose people. If you don’t believe me, that’s cool. I get it. I probably wouldn’t believe me either, but I swear I’m telling you the truth. When most people think back to their earliest memories, they can generally remember something from when they were around four or five. I knew a guy in college, Mikhael, who swore he could remember something from when he was three. He talked about it when childhood memories came up in conversation while a bunch of us were hanging out at the campus bar on April 4th, 2019. I have no way of knowing if it was true, but the rest of the people we were there with didn’t believe him. I just nodded along with the rest. “There’s no way you remember that!” I agreed. I didn’t talk about me.

This is the thing with me: there is no limit to how early I can remember. I can remember learning to walk, and crawl, and sit up, I remember the first time I ever ate purée, I remember everything. I remember being born. I promise. I know, it sounds insane, and it is, and you’re thinking “it’s a false memory. You’ve thought about it so much you’ve made up a memory in your head and that’s what you’re remembering”, but that’s not it. I know it’s true because I know some of the things the doctors and nurses said while I was being born. I know it’s true because I told my mother about it when I was only four years old. I didn’t know what most of the words the doctors and nurses had said to my mother and father, so I was asking her what they meant. As I kept talking, her face went white and she dropped her cup of coffee all over the kitchen. Some of the coffee ended up staining our living room rug until my parents decided to replace it with hardwood in June of 2006.

When I said there’s no limit, I mean no limit. I remember being in the womb, I remember growing in the womb. I remember when my heart started beating and when I could kick my legs and stretch my fingers. I remember feeling my body growing and organs developing. Fuck, I REMEMBER EVERY FUCKING THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED TO ME!!!

But, I remember before too.

I remember nothing. Literal nothing. Nothingness. Absolute, infinite, forever, nothingness.

I’ll do my best to explain. Nothingness is the absolute most peaceful thing you can imagine—more peaceful than you can imagine. Think of your favourite song in the world. Got it? OK, try to think of the absolute best single moment of that song. I’m not talking about your favourite lyric, or your favourite melodic flourish, or anything like that. I’m saying pinpoint—literally pinpoint—the exact, nanosecond of a song that is the absolute best moment. The moment where, when your listening to it, it reverberates through your bones and in your blood and your head buzzes and you feel like you’re a part of it. Like you’re a tuning fork ringing completely in tune, right down to the last cent. Now take that exact, miniscule moment and blow it up and stretch it out so that it lasts forever—has no beginning, and no end. Imagine that that exact, harmonious moment is the only thing there is, or ever was. You are witnessing it and are it.

Now, imagine the best sleep you’ve ever had in your life. I’m talking about the deepest, sweetest, most dreamless sleep you can think of. The kind of sleep where when you wake up the wrinkles from you sheets are etched in your skin and your limbs feel like they weigh a hundred pounds each. Remember the pinpoint moment of music? Combine it with the sleep and you might understand a fraction of what nothingness feels like.

I’ll bet I can guess what you’re thinking. You’re either wondering about God and religion, abortion and when a person becomes a person or why, if nothingness is so sweet, I haven’t killed myself yet to go back. Let me try to address all three.

1) I have no idea about God or an afterlife. I don’t remember seeing or experiencing anything that proves, or, I suppose, disproves it. All I know is what nothing feels like. Maybe we’re all souls adrift in the ether before we land in a body. Maybe I’m just some freak that knows what true, absolute death feels like. I wish I had an answer for you. I don’t.

2) Listen, don’t try to put in a camp that I don’t belong in. I know my experience is not the typical experience, and therefore, I don’t think it should be used as a case study or as a guideline for writing fucking law. In fact, maybe I’m the exception that proves the rule. As a fetus, there was a long time where I didn’t have a literal brain and yet I can remember. Do you remember not having a brain? When did you become a person?

3) I know I’ve made nothingness sound sweet. And, don’t get me wrong, it is. BUT, it is still nothing. My life has been fucking hard. I have struggled with this thing my whole life. But, I would not trade it away. Nothing is beautiful, but so is life. I have loved, and lost, tasted the bitter with the sweet. I have watched sunsets and stood under waterfalls. I have skated on frozen lakes and stood in wonder at the silence that a snowfall can bring. I have created life—grown it in my belly. I don’t mean to wax poetic here (God knows I’m no poet) but life is fucking beautiful and I have no idea if I’ll get to go on this ride again. I don’t remember another life before, so who knows if there will be one after. I’m not going to trade away my one chance to experience this just on the chance that I’ll get to go again. I have forever to revel in the sweet nothingness. I only have eighty or so years (if I’m lucky) to experience all life has to offer. Keep that mind if you’re ever thinking about ending it all.

If you’re still here, than you’ve made it further than the only three other people in my life I’ve ever told: my mother, Sam, and ex-husband, Derek. My mother told me to never, ever, talk about it with her, or anyone else again. And then she lamented about how badly she wanted a child, and how hard her and my father had worked and gone through to make it happen, and how all she’s wished for was to have a healthy, normal baby—just one, and she’d be happy.

Sam stopped talking to me not long after that. She never really said why, but she didn’t have to. I knew why.

And Derek was the same. Our son, Anthony, wasn’t very old and I laid awake at night, wondering if he was going to be like me. If he laid there in his crib crying, and remembering all of it like I did. I remember being this little lump in this strange world and knowing what none of it was. I was sleep-deprived and depressed and my brain had slipped in the middle of the night into that strange place where anything you think makes perfect sense and feels real. I woke Derek up right then and there, sobbing and spilling my guts about everything. I scared him, and I scared him bad. He thought I was fucking nuts and it wasn’t long after that that things fell apart. He at one point tried to tell me that he was going to try and take Anthony away from me because he thought I was dangerous to him, but his lawyer told him that it was a bad idea and that it might hurt him in the long run. There wasn’t a doubt in anybody’s mind about my integrity as a mother. Because I remembered every second of my life, it meant that I remembered every second of Anthony’s life too.

And maybe I’m (finally) getting to the point of me writing all of this down—of telling you this. I am afraid for my son. I am afraid for his future. Hell, I’m afraid, as a woman, of my future. I’m afraid for everyone’s future. I can very clearly track how we’ve gotten to where we are. I can guess again what you’re thinking and, no, there is not one single thing that triggered it (no, not even the death of a gorilla). It is bajillions of single things that got us here. Bajillions of things that have happened over the last 15,000 years. I’m not necessarily saying that getting to this moment in history was inevitable (how could I know that?) but I do know that every thing that happens, every decision we make as a whole or as individuals, has been predicated on something that happened before. I can remember my mistakes, and everything that happened leading up to them, and I think I’m getting pretty good at learning from them. Humans as a whole, however, are not very good at learning from their mistakes, and there’s lots of history to prove it. Don’t believe me? Go read a fucking book.

Which leads me to my next point. Maybe I should explain why I’m doing this—what lead me to write it all down. I was at a protest yesterday. We were marching toward the capital, with bullhorns and flags. We’re fed up and enough is enough. We are sliding down a slippery slope, and I don’t know exactly where the point of no return is, but, Christ, I think we’re over it. After yesterday, I don’t know if we can get it back.

He gave the orders. It wasn’t a full show of force—just a taste, really—but it was enough. They opened fire on us. No warning, no tear gas, no rubber bullets, no riot shields. Just real, lethal fucking force. I’ll never forget the screams or the pure fucking fear that was in the air, like static electricity. I wasn’t near the front of the line, but I could see what was happening. It was unceremonious slaughter. Like we were fucking animals.

We all turned and ran. I was lucky and got away without getting trampled, but I know there were more than a few that were. It’s so strange; everything happened so fast and in slow motion at the same time, like the whole thing happened in the blink of an eye and like I was trying to get away under water.

Me and a few of friends managed to hide in a dumpster until things calmed down. Luckily, my friend Demi lived not too far away from where we ended up hiding, and we managed to make it to her place undetected. But they’re looking for us. We don’t know how long we have until they find us, and we’re trying to work out a plan to get away. I’m writing all of this down while we’re taking a break, trying to gather our thoughts.

So, why am I writing this down. Who is it for? Anyone. Everyone. Whoever wants to read it. Maybe my son. Right now, I don’t know when I’m going to see him again. Maybe... Maybe I won’t ever see him again. And that hurts to write down. I can barely see the page through the tears in my eyes. But it’s the truth. I know everything that’s ever happened to me, but I don’t know what’s going to happen. I hope I’ll see him again. Anthony, if you are reading this: I love you.

As much as I’m fighting for everyone, I’m fighting for him. And I’m not going to stop. But, truth? Last night, after everything that happened, after sitting with the horror of what we just witnessed, I wanted to. I wanted to quit. And, sitting in the dark and in the quiet, trying to sleep but listening for any little noise that seemed out of place, like a rabbit hiding in its burrow, there was a few minutes where I could feel the nothingness calling. I started thinking, What’s the point? Maybe it’s over. Maybe it’s lost and the thought of nothing was so comforting. God, I don’t really know how close I was, but it was close.

I was trying to cry quietly, but I felt Demi slip her hand into mine in the dark, and squeeze. Remember what I said earlier? Life is precious, and it’s worth living and worth fighting for. So I won’t stop. We all deserve happiness. We all deserve to enjoy this brief trip we’re on before we go back to the nothingness. Don’t forget it. I won’t.