Unraveling

March 10, 2025

Ghoul

I am not a Jack-o-Lantern!

But I can’t help but wonder

          what it’s like for the pumpkin,

to have its guts scooped out,

          to be carved, the knife twisting deeper and deeper,

                    carving more intricate shapes.

It is the most unnecessary cosmetic surgery humanity has seen on the face of the planet.

Left out on the porch for the sake of aesthetics,

          heart lit on fire, its jovial smile hiding what is within,

                    only for it to rot on the porch as it hangs on to its tender days.

I remember now, looking at its sagged expression,

          how similar it was to my own.

My wrinkled scars and rotten heart,

          calloused hands and absent mind.

I wonder what those words you said mean, now that they’ve resurfaced. Do dead bodies float? I examine the surface of the water, a corpse floating up, rain falling down from the balance that must be sustained by the universe. Newton’s third law of motion says, "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." I know they call to take revenge—they want me to pull you under the water, forcing you to count your breaths. I know they are begging for a reaction, to lash out, to curse, to hate. But I will still speak fondly of you. Perhaps my best revenge is walking away and letting go.

There were many times where I struggled, and the way I coped was through forgetting. I say that I have a bad memory, but the truth is I selectively forget memories I don’t want to think about anymore, or alter my own memory to make it seem less painful. But this is actually incredibly dangerous. I physically cannot remember events from years ago, nor can I recall many memories on my own—a friend tells of how we hung upside down on the monkey bars, how we ran laps around the field for ice cream, or how we played tetherball, but it feels like I’m repainting an image in my mind rather than actually remembering the event itself. I was so good at forgetting that the memory was wiped out.

Perhaps what’s better is to remember, but to remember it earnestly.

In Christopher Nolan’s Inception, he plays with the idea of reality through introducing layered dreams, or a dream within a dream. If you go deep enough into someone else’s dream layers, you can introduce an idea that spirals into this person’s subconsciousness. In their words, you’d perform “inception” on this person.

One of the main messages of this movie is that reality is whatever you want it to be. There’s a scene in which an array of beds align in the room, and everyone is hooked up to an IV dripping a yellow fluid. At first, it looks like everyone laying down is afflicted with a condition, and the yellow fluid is the medicine. However, these people are actually dreaming, and they have chosen to live in a dream by constantly injecting themselves with a sedative. There’s a base reality below all of the layered dreams, but the dream is their reality because they choose it to be.

So I’ve wondered, would it be immoral to wake them up? I suppose they’re happy to live in a dream, but it’s also not reality. Or at least to me, living in a dream is not reality.

But if someone I loved chose to dream because they think it’s less painful to them, would it be better if I continued to protect them from reality by letting them live in a dream? Or should I wake them up and try to ease them into reality, having lived through it myself? Either way, reality will hit them, because they must wake up eventually—it'll hit both of us.

I don’t think I could live if I knew I wasn’t living in reality.

"Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own."

— John Irving

I feel everything spiraling again. Back in Boston. Six weeks become one. We say that we’ll keep in touch, but that feels like a mantra to make ourselves feel better. It’s almost a white lie. Overwhelming countdown to mark whether I will see anybody I love again.

Except the countdown is for two months from now. He may be in New York, five hours away by train, then five semesters before I ever see his face, a painful concept that continually tears me apart as much as I smile now. She’ll be on the other side of the coast, and we joke about which coast is better, but I know I cannot visit as much as I want to. And the rest of them will be back home—home? Will I even call it home anymore? I won’t even know what is going on, these five years melting away. In moments like these, I wish to forget.

I wonder if following my dream—a mere concept—was the right decision.

Recently, Preminger randomly found A1 while delving into liminal music. What started out as a seemingly creepy song became a shared listening experience for us.

The Caretaker made a series of six albums representing the degradation of someone’s mind from Alzheimer’s disease. A1 sounds like a normal, old-timey song with the notes being slightly out of tune, until you hear the subtle staticky sound in the background. We slowly noticed more details, such as a more grainy sound, missing notes, and repeated sections, representing blank spots in memories. Motifs in one song would be heard again later in a different song, symbolizing attempts at calling back a memory already gone.

Eventually, each song just becomes noise, as if they were incomprehensible thoughts. The stages get creepier, and if you relisten to a previous album, it’s almost numbing. There is a premonition that the irreversible is inevitable.

It is the perfect representation of life unraveling.

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