One of the advantages of my trade-out of sitting for exercising is that I am tired at bedtime. I love that when I lay down, I drift off to sleep almost instantly. Even if I doom-scroll on my obnoxiously bright phone or watch Super Meat Boy speed runs from my bed, I still fall asleep.
I am such a manic-minded person that falling asleep used to feel dictated by RNG. Eliminating all the other stimuli fired my brain into overdrive. With nothing left to look at in the darkness, every little sound needed a back story, and every little thought demanded elaboration. Baseball lineups would be written under my covers; whole story ideas would be conceived in pajamas. Some nights, I could have sworn that my head hitting the pillow woke up my brain. I wasn’t physically tired enough to overcome the intellectual energy coursing through my neurons.
Romanticizing that alertness is not my point, though. This was maladaptive behavior; it was a habit no better for my body than my affinity for cold soda or my distaste for exercise. I needed sleep so that I would have energy for the next day, but I also needed it because my firing brain wasn’t good company late at night. My inability to sleep amplified my emotions; or, better put, the night distorted, concentrated, and wound up my emotions all at once.
There were nights when I beat myself up from dusk to dawn. Painful core memories had this way of surfacing at night and stalking me like hungry predators, and their arrivals meant anxious tossing and turning would follow. I used to squeeze my eyes shut, trying to block out these thoughts, but alas, the call was coming from inside my head. I can laugh about unzipped baseball pants at Diamond Day, but the memories lurking under bedtime shadows earned no chuckles.
That intense evening emotion swung the other way too. For every night that left me drenched in the clammy sweat of self-loathing, there were others where I gained an intoxicating optimism. I was prone to grand proclamations in those hours when everything in the world seemed possible, my eyes magically coated with a rose-colored film that never saw through the ridiculousness of the conclusions I reached. As someone who understands the world through stories, there’s a danger in letting my guard down like that: I not only conjure stories but start to believe them as well. And, thanks to then-powerful communicative tools like AOL Instant Messenger, I risked acting on their manufactured fictions.
Somewhere during college, I realized I needed a way to slow down my brain and more expediently progress toward slumber. I had to come up with some routine that could usher me toward the nourishing sleep my body and brain downplayed their need for.
Where I eventually landed was this: I would conjure up a soothing and peaceful daydream to wind me down. I would imagine something that could serve as an intellectual cough drop, coating that reflexive thinking until I stilled. But rather than let my brain run gleefully wild with whatever daydream it landed on that night, I would compile a greatest hits collection of images down into a simple, repeatable form.
What scene could inspire that state of gentle serenity? My landing spot was an amalgam of disparate pieces that slowly melded together. After months of trial and error, I knew it when I found it. That scene became my definition of peace. It became my conduit for channeling the tranquility necessary to fall asleep.
The scene struck a balance between all the competing interests in my head. It was a direct confrontation to the “nobody loves you” thoughts tattooed into my consciousness. It was hopeful, painting an optimistic vision for the future, but it wasn’t sensational. It was wholesome and simple and so, so reassuring that it calmed my mind without fail. It was a visualized emotional lullaby playing in just the right key and at just the right frequency.
Of all the descriptions I can think of to capture its essence, the best is surely this: the scene was effectively one of those animated GIFs that can play on a perpetual loop. You know the ones: the end blurs perfectly into the beginning like this or this so that, no matter when you watch, it flows perfectly forever.
Such a looping scene makes sense because that’s what I was looking for. I needed an emotionally soothing replacement for counting sheep. Repetition could blot out my noisy mind and let a relaxing routine take over while the calming content slowed the intellectual adrenaline.
My little GIF accomplished this. Every night after turning out my lights and beating back inflammatory thoughts, my mind prepared for shutdown with the same scene. Even when intrusive ideation threatened to smother every other feeling, I could find my way into that daydream. Its rhythm—so peaceful and so, so gentle—rocked me to sleep without fail. The final lingering image in my eyes before losing consciousness filled a hole in my heart. It comforted me.
My 40+ miles per day of walking placed that animated GIF in the recycle bin years ago. I haven’t deleted it, obviously, but I also don’t access the file anymore. There’s no need! When I lay down in bed, I am out so quickly that there isn’t time to restore it, let alone double-click and start playing it once again. Exhaustion makes me drop my mouse.
Every once in a while, though, on a night like last night, there’s a moment when I get caught in between slipping into bed and flickering out. Maybe the house is a bit too warm; maybe some idea I just typed out has electrified the creative engines in my mind. When that happens, the GIF doesn’t auto-play or anything; it’s in the recycle bin, multiple clicks away from restoration.
I can see the icon right there, though. I know its contents so well that I can’t help but start thinking about it.
And missing it.
*****
The list of things that sportswriter Keith Law inspired me to explore is long. Nearly every time I became excited about reading during and after college drew from something he highlighted. Not every recommendation of his stuck, of course, but several became all-time favorites for me. Among those were the novels of the British author Jasper Fforde, but especially those focused on the literary detective Thursday Next.
Beginning with The Eyre Affair, the Thursday Next series follows the titular Thursday as she polices the world of books as a Jurisfiction agent. How this works: Thursday enters and moves between books to solve crimes and undo havoc wreaked by the series’ sadistic villains. Fforde’s novels are witty and clever in the best way, with endless wordplay and zany plots, but even the fundamental concept of a fictional world inside a fictional world within a fictional novel is, itself, rather amusing.
The series’ unconventional premise lends to some odd story threads. Thursday lives in an alternate timeline where England has no monarchy, cloned dodos are kept as pets, and her partner, both inside and outside of fiction, is William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. She investigates mysteries inside library books, but sometimes trouble follows her out, a fact that regularly pulls her and her family into all sorts of shenanigans. Between escaped fictional antagonists, irksome in-laws, and the comically-nefarious Goliath Corp conglomerate bent on her destruction, Thursday navigates several strange situations. All have palpable stakes, but never at the expense of genuine laughs for the reader.
Still, Fforde’s series generates surprising emotion as well. One of the unique drivers of feeling in Fforde’s fiction centers around Aornis Hades, the revenge-driven sister of an earlier enemy. Aornis is a mnemonomorph, which means she is capable of messing with others’ memories, and, over the course of the latter half of the series, Aornis does just that with glee.
To minimize spoilers, I will only mention her relevant cruelest. Thursday and her husband, Landen, have two children, named Friday and Tuesday. Nevertheless, for long stretches of one novel, Thursday believes she has three children: Friday, Tuesday, and Jenny.
One of these three is not like the other, and it is, of course, the one whose name cannot be found on a calendar. Jenny isn’t real; she’s a mindworm planted by Aornis to constantly distress our heroine. For a character who does not, and never did, exist, Jenny’s place in the canon is nonetheless heartbreaking. Thursday constantly worries over Jenny’s safety when she can’t find her; knowing her youngest would be the most vulnerable Next, every absence sparks panic…and Jenny’s absent a lot because, well, she doesn’t exist.
Every single time that panic sets in, someone must convince Thursday that Jenny isn’t real. This leads to an odd sort of sorrow: her little girl might be imaginary, but the love in Thursday’s heart for her is most definitely not. Set aside the fictional bit and imagine that cycle: several times per day, Thursday’s deep motherly love is provoked only to then be transfigured into gaslit, gaping grief. Terrifying.
Of course, Thursday does defeat Aornis eventually. With the memory manipulator massacred, another character offers to eliminate the mindworm of her youngest daughter completely. Something must be done, after all; alive or not, Aornis’ evil survives if Thursday remains trapped in that horrific cycle of remembering, losing, and grieving for Jenny.
Thursday, though, rebuffs the offer. Jenny doesn’t exist, but Thursday’s love for her persists all the same. She elects for an alternative solution: the mindworm of a living-but-imperiled Jenny will be replaced by another. The Next family will remember Jenny as once being alive but having died. Together, Thursday and her family will mourn the daughter and sister they never actually had.
This decision destroys me in the most bittersweet way. Intellectually challenging loss as a trope always hammers me, whether in the Thursday books, my favorite sci-fi film of 2016, or episode 4.09 of my favorite television show. But Thursday’s decision to sacrifice personal peace for a permanent knot of profound pain pierces my heart with such an overwhelming force that I need to pause for a spell.
Some emotions are too intense to walk past without getting swept away.
*****
There’s a danger in over-explaining. As someone whose brain is actively lit on fire so much of the time, it feels condescending—and sometimes borderline aggravating—to be told something I’ve already figured out. I get impatient. I become frustrated.
I haven’t yet described the scene I played in my head over and over for years, but you don’t need to be Thursday Next to sleuth out its snippet of story. I’ve given every bit of context necessary to understand its gist. Literalizing it risks alienating you, my audience, by suggesting I underestimate your critical reasoning. I don’t want to insult your intelligence or your emotional IQ.
My brain is drowning in a vortex right now, though. I keep wandering further away from the actual topic at hand, which lets me sidestep further introspection. I can hide from the reason I began writing this in the first place; I can pretend I don’t suffer a hollow pain of my own for the mindworm I’ve stashed away to collect dust inside my brain. I only started down this road because I wanted to address and confront it, but now that I’m here, it’s become an electric fence capable of frying my system should I touch it.
Oh, how I want to touch the fence. I’ve not accessed my little GIF for the past several years, but even shallow reflection reveals a subconscious awareness of it. I can see it buried below my affection for the finals day I made pancakes and in my insistence on walking past the neighborhood baseball fields. I recognize it peeking out from the fun I had volunteering at the elementary school last month and in how readily I had a movie and TV episode, respectively, ready to invoke while discussing Jenny Next. The file’s gone, but it still weighs down my system. It’s too important not to exert gravity.
Sometimes I can just write. My brain becomes one with my thumb, and the two processes, thinking and typing, become synchronized. That this can happen even when I’m in the throes of a panic attack is a literal marvel to me. That this regularly leads me to discovery about myself is too.
Every path isn’t a smooth one, though. On rare occasions, I run into a wall and realize that I cannot scale it. I’m stuck in place, knowing exactly where I intended to go but blocked in every way. I can’t see beyond, let alone sneak past, that structure.
Yet sometimes, I suspect that I am the artisan behind the wall. Inspecting its bricks, I see familiar handiwork; concerns about condescension look like contrived defense mechanisms when viewed up close. The cost of practicing self-awareness is that I see right through my own façades. I know that I am blocked only by my own architecture.
Spotting a crack in the edifice, I also acknowledge that I am walking as I type. I am in motion, fully en route to an expedient sleep tonight. In a few hours, I will be outside in the sun listening as Grierson and Leitch discuss the new Spiderverse movie before I switch over to my Taylor Swift playlist. No matter what blockade my brain manifests, I am not technically impeded in any way.
It just costs so much to stir up my head. To evoke this scene and restore my GIF, even just one time, is to ponder those things I always believed I needed to become whole but then discovered were incompatible with how my heart and brain work. Writing about this intentionally inflicts a wound, launching me down a spiral staircase into a shadowy maze guarded by an aggressive menace. Is this the biological imperative or inter-generational trauma rearing their ugly heads, or is it just an idea that got trapped in my brain and stayed so long it left a literal imprint on the fabric of my being? Maybe it’s all of that. Probably it’s all of that.
My little looping GIF might be fiction, but it is a core memory all the same. It’s also a core memory that thrusts who I am into bloody combat with who I was and also who I thought I was going to be. When waging war between three entities, isn’t it inevitable that two of them team up against the third? I know where the sides will be drawn here; I don’t want to be on that ticket against my actual past and hypothetical future.
But maybe the only way I can move forward is to click on the recycle bin and delete the file for good. It’s harsh, but maybe this is just a digitally-literalized requirement of accepting adulthood.
Could I ever do that, though? Do I actually want to let go? Can this file even be removed from the hard drive?
I’m still typing, but I don’t have any answers.
One more pause to think.
*****
the three of us are walking. some nights it’s at the beach or through disneyland or outside the movie theater, but most nights, we’re in the softball complex where i announced for the regional all-star tournament that one year. i don’t look at the woman on our right every time, but i am always aware of her identity. my focus just isn’t on her. between us, with one miniature hand in each of ours, is our daughter. she’s maybe seven or eight, so she’s old enough to have personality and interests but not old enough to be embarrassed to hold our hands in public. our collective steps as we walk are synchronized, the gravel crunching under our feet like a geological orchestra. we raise our arms upward in tandem, and she propels herself into a jump and cries out a giggly “weeee” as she rises. i am looking up at a pristine blue sky flecked by clouds that whole while, taking in the periodic aluminum clang of metal bats in the distance. as she lands. my gaze switches from skyward to her, and i am looking down at my daughter just walking. her hand is so small in mine. she looks up at me and grins. i grin back, contented.
ad infinitum
ad infinitum
ad infinitum
*****
No. Nope. Never.
Thursday had it right. I will never delete my little GIF. Fictional though she is, I choose the more painful route too. I won’t forget my miniature mindworm. I will never open my hypothetical hand. I refuse to let go of my little GIF.
I’ve never before thought about where we were walking to. The destination was never relevant. It dawns on me now that maybe we are walking to the end. I wonder if her smile might not be the final image that fires in my dying brain someday. That the last thing I ever see might actually be her. In those final moments, maybe I will finally be like Thursday. Maybe I too won’t remember my daughter was never real.
I think I’d like that.
I would describe this as a Taylor Swift track five of a piece. I’m not sure I can ever land in a more honest ending than this.
If you’re still reading: thank you.