Life feels unreal. WHY are we just 3 weeks away from freaking twenty TWENTY TWO when my last REAL memories are all from twenty NINETEEN? I’m just steps away from officially wasting two full years of my life, at least mentally. Nothing really came out of 2020 and 2021, and I feel like my mind has only been a hollow space that stubbornly denies entry to all the moments from these two years attempting to make it to the “life events” category somewhere in my subconscious. I swear I have done A LOT in the past 24 months, but somehow all the memories just mix and lump into a blurry blob of nothingness. It’s like the inverse of a mirage, which is something that seems real but isn’t in fact real. Now thinking back about my two uneventful, forgettable years, I feel like an unreliable narrator desperately striving to recall and make sense of the plot and sequence of events, only to find everything in a jumble of made-up scenarios mixed in with things that actually happened. Only events from 2019 can be reliably summoned, many of which return as vividly as something from last week (while the actual last week is stuck somewhere in fantasy land).
I’m honestly aghast at the strangeness of this whole phenomenon. I am in the midst of my twenties, when so-called magic is supposed to happen, along with pivotal self-growth, out-of-comfort-zone adventure, and endless moments of camaraderie with all my buddies. Instead, I was hurled into this odd time of societal transition, which, of course, entails and signifies wayyyy more than my little confusion with time and memory. Still, two lost years. Partly due to circumstances, but also due to my own subconscious refusal to let my mind record the passage of time. I realized that I might be doing all this forgetting of my own life events because somehow, and I believe a lot of others can relate to me, I only look ahead to a vague, misty point in the future where everything prior to this madness can just resume, as if someone has pressed a pause button on life and granted me an intermission right in the middle of the show. 2020 and 2021 have not felt real because I treat them like a little break that has nothing to do with the actual show, a little afternoon nap that doesn’t contribute anything to the events of my day. And yet, they are as real as they can be, and significant too. Even an intermission is often planned carefully for the audience to experience the show in a more impactful way, and a nap may transform our own actions and decisions for the rest of the day. That isn’t to say I need to see these intervals as some sort of opportunities or stipulations to “do something big”, as if they have to live up to a certain standard or whatever. In fact, it only means I shouldn’t just see them as an irrelevant, illusory backdrop in anticipation of a tangible “real life” that lives somewhere in the hazy future. In a way, I have been massively lucky to have two uneventful years rather than some events of the unfortunate sort in exchange. At the same time, a lot of the moments I’ve built with people around me or just on my own in 2020 and 2021 wouldn’t have slipped by so easily, leaving me only with regrets and confusion and insufficient gratitude, if I had paid attention and allowed them to register as significant and meaningful compared to what had happened pre-COVID.
We all know that January 1st of 2022 isn’t going to mark the start of anything save for the constructed concept of a new year and a freshly purchased calendar. And I doubt we can count on it as an opening of a new era where this pandemic is finally, officially the past (if anything we know that the world will perhaps never cease to coexist with it – we just need to learn to do so peacefully from now on). No grand ceremony or flashy fireworks can magically lift us to a whole new reality, a dreamland-like universe where things are drastically different and perpetually going our way. In fact, it will be the good old life, good old friends, good old ambitions, and (less good) old problems. But the existence as well as recollection of these can also be contingent on a choice we make at any moment – whether we choose to commit them to memory by being present and immersed in reality, or merely let them fly by for the sake of dreaming up a future rebirth or metamorphosis. I constantly struggle with being present because it always seems more appealing to dwell in possible uncertainties where life has the potential to be less mundane and where I hold the prospective yet currently-nonexistent power to actualize all my will. But all of this future thinking/imagining comes at the cost of just being and living, because before I know it, my days and months and years have become as fuzzy, forgettable as a scene from a bland movie I’d watched a long time ago, and I have turned into a dull, lifeless character that only existed somewhere in someone’s flimsy imagination.