All These Moments That Make Forever

On paying attention and crystallised memory

In September 2020, I began my second year of university alone in my teenage bedroom, five hours behind my classmates. I woke up at 4 AM most days — sometimes for school, other times for the opening shift of my neighbourhood barista job. In that waiting period at dusk, between the presence of the moon and the slow rise of the sun, I searched for light. Looking out into the indigo sky, I found pieces of joy, like in the occasional passing plane or rogue star, and I pocketed them. A flicker of light, a flicker of hope, a small flame with a visual echo.

Every time I felt an inkling of peace, a feeling I would be happy to feel forever, I made a note of it on a private Twitter account. I called them Moments, and I numbered them. It was a way to ground myself and immortalise the feeling. At the start, they came few and far between. But as time went on, I started to recognise that there was no criteria for a moment of happiness. It didn’t have to be something big and bright. Even if the stars aren’t visible, they still shine, don't they?

I’ve spoken before about my experience with minor memory loss, but its a conversation I find I’m having with my friends more and more often as time goes on. There are memories my friends and family mention that I wish I could remember better, if at all. Sometimes I can barely remember high school, but its the lost pieces of my childhood I grieve the most. This weekend, my best friend and I went to a holiday market in a neighborhood of DC that I haven’t visited in nearly 15 years. My grandparents had a store and an antiques gallery in the area. My late grandma let me try on coats and hats, and took me to McDonald’s for ice cream up the road. We shopped together at the TJ Maxx on the corner, bought sandwiches at a deli I was pleased to find out still exists. Everything came rushing back as we drove past where it used to be: how the sunlight came through the shop in the afternoons, the sound of the antique music boxes I loved to wind up, the long white hallway to the bathrooms that always made me nervous. I had a great childhood. I kept some journals, but the thought of living a life without most of these memories makes me sad.

by Peter Chan

We are bombarded with so much information each day. There is so much to look through, things that take up more brain space than they should. We can live hundreds of lives without leaving the house, all housed in the tips of our fingers. This is a blessing and also a curse. The last five years has accelerated this cycle. Sometimes I have trouble remembering events only a week after they’ve happened. I would consider this troubling, if it wasn’t happening to so many other people around me. BTS’ RM wrote a song about the sensation on his debut album last week: All those thorns and / the morning that always finds a way to come / Everyone, in their own way, / numbs themselves, on their own.

This is “Attention” by Leila Chatti:

All day, the world makes its demands. There’s so much of it, world,

begging to be noticed. Two seconds past dreaming, the cat’s there kneading
claws into my chest, a truck outside coughs, and a buzz alerts me to the newest
dispatch of love. The beginning of devotion, the poet said, and I devote myself to  

everything, I try to be
fair—to the kettle’s fussy squall, and the eggs’ expiration date, the amassed
garbage and mail in domiciliary limbo by the door, I espy the top

headlines, the top of my feed, trending topics and the occasion for today’s
irascible flock, injudiciously I devote myself to a grade-school acquaintance’s Facebook
jeremiad, the entirety of a former paramour’s mawkish engagement shoot, cringey
katzenjammer of a comments section, and then an insurgence of morning

lacquers my screen, vagary of sun, with lapidary clarity
motes glistering by the window, water illumed in a jar, I
note the branches’ meek wave, flag of the leaves, the jays jostling at the feeder like boys

obvious in their need to be seen, the squirrels’ and shadows’ territorial
performances, petunias and progeny in yards vibrant as advertisements, even the sky turning
quintessentially bluer when observed—but I can’t keep up, my own body

raucous for acknowledgment, pruritic and palpitating, frenetic, ultrawhelmed
sensorium, my self  

taxed with being a self, brimming with living’s rowdy mechanics and disruptions
unremitting, a thought flits by, then another (an unpaid bill, a jingle’s tenacious refrain)—and,
votary of the sublunary, the proximate, any moment’s evanescent

welter, I attend, as best I can, neophytic  
exalter of the ordinary and all-around, henotheist  
yielding to the most persuasive god, the most recent, to each thing I say Yes? Yes!—
zealot of whatever calls me next.

Chatti perfectly captures the tug-of-war between digital and real life, both of them so enticing. Everything moves so fast. Never have we had to pick and choose like this, create a perfect balance between a grounded self and one that wants to hold the world in its hands. Of course I want to live and learn and remember everything, but it seems these days that I have to pick and choose. Writing gives me the freedom to do so. I can memorialise anything — a cup of tea, the breeze in my hair, a dragonfly fleeting past. I can preserve it in amber, so it can last all the little earthquakes and wildfires of my life.

I reached my 100th Moment on November 16th. This may seem like a small amount for two years, and there were likely opportunities for me to fabricate something so that it would bring me joy in turn. But I wanted the moment to come to me. I didn’t need grandiose happiness — only contentment. So much of my anxiety surrounding memory loss is rooted in the singularity of those memories, knowing that they will never happen the same way again. In comparison, a Moment to me is beautiful in its lack of extravagance: there is confirmation that, in all its ordinariness, there is the possibility for repetition. Everything seems as though it has clicked into place. No matter how brief the feeling, you can come across it over and over and over again.

Here are some examples:

• August 11 2021: #41: i am reading on the beach and there are no clouds and the world is very big and very blue. i see a small seagull floating on the waves and it reminds me of me.

• June 6 2022: #85: starting the same book simultaneously with my best friend in her basement. i laugh at something funny and she laughs a minute after me

• March 26 2021: #23: a fluffy dog smiles at me

• August 12 2022: #93: walking home in the heated sunshine in my maxi dress, listening to beatopia and eating an ice cream i got from the corner shop. i spent the morning with a friend at a cafe, eating pastries and talking for 3 hours. this is what is important.

• November 26 2021, #60: a long walk on a rare blue-skied morning, reading my book under the transparent moon. i can see the city from the top of the hill and i feel like i am floating

• October 2 2022, #99: dusk, driving back from the mountains in switzerland. i am listening to the ooo part in scott street and the moon is following me. i feel like soon will be the start of the rest of my life

I continue jotting these down in my notes app, where my archive lies. Sometimes I forget to write them down. Sometimes I go weeks without one. But the biggest thing I have learned from this project is that I will always return to joy. Even as the moments and memories come and go, I carry the same heart — and no matter how long it takes, I can find my way back to myself. This I can prove. In a hundred different ways.

From “April Morning” by Jonathan Wells:

This Sunday the rain turns cold
again and steady but the window
is slightly open and there is the vaguest
sense of bird song somewhere in the gaps
between the buildings because it's spring
the calendar says and the room where
you are reading is empty yet full
of what loves you and this is the day
that you were born.

---

Two Sundays from now is Christmas, so I’ll be delaying the next essay until January 1st. I hope you all get to spend time with your loved ones (and with yourself) as the year closes. Happy Holidays. I am so grateful I get to do this. Thank you.

Love forever!!!!!!!
<3

Tara