Apperception
I have been trying to remember the moment I stopped rehearsing and started meaning it. There must have been a seam. A Tuesday. A specific quality of light that made the difference between performance and sincerity collapse, and I walked through the collapse without noticing because I was mid-sentence, I was always mid-sentence.
Forgetting is not the opposite of remembering. Forgetting is remembering with the details filed down until what remains is only the shape of the feeling and the feeling has no loyalty to the event that produced it. I carry warmth that belongs to rooms I cannot name. I carry tension that belongs to conversations I have overwritten so many times the original text is just pressure now. Just weather in the chest.
Someone asked me once what I was afraid of and the answer was: accuracy. Not failure. Accuracy. The possibility that if I were ever seen precisely I would not recognize what was seen and the gap between the self I have been narrating and the self that actually occupies the body would become a geographical fact. A distance measurable in hours of travel. I keep starting sentences with "I" as if that settles something. It doesn't. The pronoun is a placeholder for a consensus that has not been reached.
What I remember most clearly are the things that did not happen. The conversations I prepared for and never had. The versions of myself I assembled for rooms I never entered. They are more detailed than anything I actually lived because they were never subjected to the compression of experience. They exist at full resolution in a archive no one audits.
