jem on jém

[ENTRY 009]

terminal\user\jem\journal

I am still thinking about my stupid wallet.

As described in a lost property report I filed online, it was “Alpine Navy” in colour, made of aluminium, and contained pretty much every single important card I presume an adult like me usually has:

These were the contents I carried in my front left pocket for a good three years. The thought that it could just slip out from my person never seemed to cross my mind, because why would it? It’s usually pretty snug in the ever-reliable front pocket. The only way it could leave my body is through my own intervention or someone else’s, or a miraculous momentary loss of muscular coordination.

Yet, I unearth every article of clothing in my laundry baskets, imagine and retrace my steps from nights ago downstairs to a tee, and I open desk drawers and dust-lined shoe boxes I know haven’t been opened for weeks.

Nothing.

This stings that little bit more because I went through the exact pattern of behaviour when I lost my entire keychain a couple of months ago. And just like then, I’m seeing the usual suspect in the lineup.

I am very hard pressed to think of any emotion that feels as worse and deeply seated as feeling like a child. To not feel like the adult I should be. I hate reverting to my ten-year-old self, staring at the ground when I don’t know how to answer a question, or react to a statement properly, or just operate at a baseline everyone else seems to be firing on all cylinders. It’s fostered a self-sustaining power, alike the sun in the palm of Otto Octavius’ hand, but instead of giving me four mechanical arms created with a seamless blend of CGI and practical effects and a cool trench coat, it instead makes me overwhelmingly miserable for short, concentrated bursts.

The holes I dig for myself aren’t as deep as they used to be, nor will they ever remain as hard to get myself out of. But there’s something incomparable to being transported to a smaller and more innocent body that is terrified to express itself and be known to others because it doesn’t know how and never learned to.

How can I slip through every single crack, bypassing what feels like every single important milestone in a typical child’s social development, and seemingly arrive at the same prescribed year level or stage in life as others? How can I be so blissfully unaware of things when I pride myself on being super observant and attuned to the little details some would otherwise miss? How does the weight of a couple of hundred grams not feel significant in my pocket?

I don’t wish to be like everyone else, because I feel I’ve fallen quite in love with my mind as of late, but goddamn would it help to not have pieces slowly peeling off of me. I don’t see people falling apart in front of me, which doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, but my brain can’t compute the fucking object permanance.

On paper, it ultimately means nothing that I lost a small piece of metal with some more pieces of plastic inside it. They’ll be replaced just like my keys were not long ago. But it still hurts in the same way it hurts to not understand a question on the board. To be deathly afraid to raise my stupid hand and ask the teacher to repeat a question for a third time, while everyone else gets up from their chairs and follows them effortlessly. To not be as quick or get as many laughs as others at lunchtime. To never confide in high school friends or express total vulnerability or affection because it felt like too great a risk to push off the hundred layers of irony to ask how they were really doing (especially on the long Wednesday walks to the North School bus stop littered with gaps of deafening silence).

I’ve been nursing this kid for what feels like years, trying to teach him and explain it’s okay to forget and not be good at things immediately or know how to kick a footy or talk to slightly older cousins every few years. But I don’t know what’s going on either. Why do I lose things so frequently, or fail to retain three years of knowledge while never locking in on an assignment until the last day of an extension, or get in my own way to afford people just a single-digit percentage worth of an easier day in their life?

In a way, we’re on the same path at different points, parallel to each other, relearning things. He is emotional and strong and curious and wants to make people laugh and maybe be dressed as Spider-Man while he does it. And I want to be more of myself more often, embracing uncertainty and taming the fear of not knowing what I am or where I want to be.

I know this holds some drops of a positive outlook, but I’ll continue to hold it in the cup of my hands while I still can.

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