Forgetful Lover,

"Abandonment complex" isn't quite the right term, but I'm always waiting for you to get bored. Not with me, perhaps, but with whatever we're doing. I'm waiting for you to leave the old and start something new. I'm content to stay in the same spot, doing the same things, recreating the same projects indefinitely. But you, you're always starting new lives, finding new niches. I can't keep up.

My perception of time is all fucked up. It's as though my current state of mind has been my state of mind for a long time, but I'm just now, at this very moment, realizing how it is different from the state of mind I was in just before it became what it is...

It's like that guy... Clive Waring? Or Wearing? Or something? The guy who had really severe short-term memory loss--as in, it often didn't last more than a few seconds. He kept a journal, and every time he started a new entry, he always said that this moment, this one happening right now, at this very second, was the first time he'd been awake in a very long time. All the hundreds of entries before this one had been fakes or something close. But this one, this was the genuine article. This moment defined a profound change in his life--in fact, the beginning of his life.

I feel like we're all Clive, really. The present moment always seems to outshine and overshadow the past ones. Even those of us who keep journals look back on past entries, and we see that they express the same sentiments that we're feeling now, but we discount them. "Surely, I couldn't have understood that statement as I do now. I couldn't have meant the same thing by that as I mean now."

(Maybe that's just me; maybe I shouldn't speak for everyone.)

But what if we did mean the same thing? What if we are continually waking into a single moment, stunned each time by the profundity of it? Though the really stunning thing is the monotony of life. The real profundity lies in the fact that we can find any joy along this flatish line on this 2D graph.

--Debbie Downer