I remember you

for Chelsea

I can still remember the moment I met you. I see it so clearly here when I close my eyes.

When I opened the door to see you lying in bed and reading a book, I tried not to bother you but also hoped you’d become my companion for the weekend. The company of a beautiful woman seemed like the best way to explore one of the most beautiful places on earth.

But I didn’t know you would change my life. Didn’t know that had the next two minutes gone differently, I would have left France not even knowing your name. Six months later, I would have moved to Hong Kong to teach English for two years. Even now, nearly eleven years later, had those two minutes gone slightly differently, I might still be in Hong Kong or back in Korea. Possibly I would be dead, never knowing the love you shared so perfectly.

So many choices. Such simple choices.

Who would I be without you?

Who would I be had I not been so broken hearted when I was twenty that I moved to Ireland for a year, which led me to abandon a career in neuroscience before I even finished my degree, which led me to look for jobs abroad because I never learned to stop breaking my own heart?

I went to Asia because getting a job in Europe was more difficult and paid less. Went to Korea instead of Japan because it was even easier to find a job there. Ended up at the hagwon I did because they offered me a contract first.

Had that job been less shitty, I wouldn’t have left at the end of my year.

Had my sister not been pregnant with my first nephew, I may also have not come home then (he was born surprisingly early, just three days after I got home).

Had I not been home, I wouldn’t have talked to my friend about her travel plans to France that she booked before her French boyfriend broke up with her. She convinced me to come visit her because she was going to be there alone for six months, which is a significant chunk of time to be anywhere, especially by yourself, especially when you had originally planned the trip for love.

And so I did.

EVERYTHING

Billions of years ago, stars exploded and gave birth to the atoms that would make up our world, that would form the material of our bodies. These atoms caught in their own eternal recurrence where they combined and broke apart and combined and broke apart in myriad permutations only to one day become me. To become you.

Who would I be without you?

What would I be without you?

A year before I met you, I wrote the sentence me without you is no one at all and I wrote it as a chorus to a novel about loneliness and isolation, about a woman seeking a man tumbling through space and time, watching as he became so distracted by his own obsessions that he did not ever notice how she began to fall apart and fade, dissolving into nothing but ash to stain pavement in a city being swallowed by an apocalypse brought on the wings of crows the size of eagles.

Never let me go, I wrote as another chorus in that novel. These two choruses echoing against one another until they resolved into another final sentence: I will remember you.

I have been many people. I had been so many people in the brief years I’d been alive before I met you. I had loved hard and lost everything. Lived hard and lost pieces of myself all over three continents. Given myself and my heart away and watched as they shattered at my own feet.

I have forgotten so much in my life. I have been many people because of my capacity to forget. I have seen myself as a stranger because I can no longer inhabit who I once was, but I accept that all these different versions of me are all me, have always been me, and had certain choices been made or not made, I may never have met you.

And I would be still a different version of myself.

The saddest version of myself is the one who never met you. I almost was this person. It terrifies me to imagine who I might be today had you not spoken to me that night in Nice when we were briefly alone in a hostel room together, before your friends came back, before they invited me to spend the weekend with all of you.

I can see who I would be. I see how I died, a long time ago. Alone in a room where no one knew me.

I have even written a novel about a version of me who lost you. It’s a harrowing claustrophobic novel of 100,000 words that takes place over the course of 18 hours. It may be the best thing I’ve ever written but it nauseates me to even think about. And so even though part of me wants to get it published, maybe even find a real life agent for it, I keep it here on my computer where no one will see it. Where the ghosts of that version of myself remain locked away, and I remain deaf to the harrowing howling of a version of me I hope I never need to face.

Who would I be without you?

I’d be no one at all.

But.

There is another version of all this. Something I’ve believed since the moment I met you.

I exist because of you.

Even before we met. Even before I knew your name or face or touch, I existed because of you. In all the endless permutations of life, in all possible choices that led me to Nice, France on February 16th in 2012, in all the possible iterations of ydde that I had been, in all the ways our atoms had been bound together and unbound themselves, all this energy and momentum carried me ceaselessly towards you.

I am because of you.

I could never be any other way. All those possible choices made and not made, they all led me to that room at that exact moment when I had to be alone with you. When I got to be alone with you.

When I first heard your voice and spoke your name.

Those brief moments when, even then, I felt as if my life balanced on the point of a blade. I could have fallen in any direction and landed as a person who never came to know you, who never experienced your love.

But I didn’t.

Couldn’t.

There was always only you.

I had a dream. I had it for many years. An entire decade of my life, I had the same dream over and over again. A dream that both comforted and terrified me.

A woman in silhouette walking away from me.

I have assigned meaning to this many times in life. I’ve painted many different faces on that silhouette. But when I was sixteen, it simply stopped happening.

I’ve never dreamt that dream again. That dream that feels foundational to my sense of self.

It’s a dream I told you once.

Do you remember?

EVERYWHERE

I remember so little in life. I used to find the date of my earliest memories embarrassing because I was so much older than most people when their conscious lives began. But, as far as I can tell, my first real memory happened in 1992 when I was almost five.

I have forgotten so many things in the years between. Whole years of my life captured in a few fragmentary flashes.

This may be a side effect of severe depression. Maybe a coping mechanism for the apocalypse inside my skull.

All the things I don’t remember—I have no words for all the parts of me that have slipped away because of my damaged brain and broken heart.

But there are different memories. Memories that burn so large and so bright that my whole life revolves around them. They expand with time, swallowing more and more of my conscious life and the story of my own life, which is the story I tell myself about myself.

That first memory is one such memory. My mother crying in the living room alone. She had just heard that her father died. I went to her, not knowing that then, and I climbed into her lap and held her. I just held her and was held by her. Held her the way only a little boy can hold his mother, the way a weeping mother holds her boy. Offering what comfort my tiny body could.

This memory grows, expanding, consuming more and more of my mental landscape, defining the topography of my life from its earliest moments all the way to this very moment, where I am remembering the experience of remembering. With each remembrance of a memory, it grows yet further and becomes bound to these other moments, locking certain memories to so many different memories of my own life. And so I cannot remember the first time I told a girl that I loved her when I was sixteen without remembering my mother crying because her father had just died. I can’t remember being told a few months later that I survived through a miracle without remembering the love I tried to give away without remembering my mother crying because of her dead father. I cannot stand beside the cliff I fell off that landed me in that hospital where the entire nursing staff began referring to me as the miracle boy without remembering my mother crying over her father. I cannot remember the week I spent in a Korean hospital without remembering the miracle I was, remembering my broken heart, remembering my mother’s tears.

I have had a belief all my life that I cannot share certain memories. Not because they’re too dark or harrowing, but because they mean too much to me. And when you share a memory, it stops being only yours, starts living its own life beyond you. And so there are memories I have never uttered aloud. Not to anyone. That I cannot.

And, no, I will not write them here. I will not write them anywhere.

They’re mine.

So many moments with you have become locked in that same vault.

ALL AT ONCE

You have wondered why I don’t write about you here. I’m sure some of the readers have wondered the same thing.

It’s because you are too much. You are too precious to simply give away. To put my memories of you into words, to give them away to everyone reading here—I simply cannot.

I will not.

I cannot.

I will not.

They are mine and I fear letting them go.

I say all this now, here, because I want you to know that I remember you.

I remember so much of you. I remember nearly every day with you.

You cannot know what it has meant to me to remember so much of the last decade of my life. My life with you, with our cats, with our sons. You cannot know—no one, really, can ever know how precious my memories are to me.

Our memories are who we are. They make us ourselves.

And you have given me a self to hold onto. I no longer run from myself, from my pains, from the stories I told myself about myself and my life that made me all these many other people.

With you, I have become one person.

You have healed me in ways that cannot be explained, that I cannot ever really make anyone understand. I have been so fractured and scattered and shattered.

But then there was you.

Impossible you.

You have given me your love and you have given me memories to fill my life. Memories of all these days with you. Your touch. Your smile. Your voice—how I love your voice.

I can hear you. I hear you now, even while sitting alone in this empty room full of my many ghosts.

You have given me so much.

You have made me whole.

I remember you.

And I will remember you and all the years we’ll share that have yet to come.

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For those who have been asking for me to review Everything Everywhere All at Once: I just did.