What are we going to do?
We've opened the door, now it's all coming through...
"How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful", Florence + the Machine
Today I found myself sending LinkedIn invites to old college friends from the Honors Program at the UPR, members of my old tribe. I miss them, or rather the idea of them, the possibility of finding myself through their eyes. Who knows what they would think of me nowadays, if they remember anything at all. They'll probably take one look at my profile and yawn, and no lifeline will pull me out of the fog. They have all gotten PhDs and done interesting, even important things in the same span of time I have failed at two marriages, made a career out of Excel pivot tables and become a master at predicting the immediate past.
As my eyesight has gone south, so has my memory. I can't be trusted to keep all this shit straight. I need friends to tell who I am. But I have no friends. Or rather, the few I have barely know me. I have done a great job of limiting access to what's really on my mind and curating my persona so as to avoid controversy. But the result is that nobody fucking cares, and I am slowly vanishing into the ether. I am becoming translucent. Not long from now, only my cats will be able to see me.One day this specific recipe of neuroses and idiosyncrasies will simply disappear. There will be traces here and there, pieces of a puzzle, mostly in the memory of my girls and my exes.
I should have been paying more attention to building memories, maybe trying to practice some mindfulness, but instead two, perhaps three decades have been lived on cruise control.
