I back myself up every five years, so I can ask old iterations of me questions.
It’s expensive but I want to never lose a thing. There is so much degradation and rewriting of memories over time.
What I didn’t count on, or hadn’t thought of, was that each past me had done his fair share of rewriting and degrading his memories, too. What 20 year old me thinks about what happened to 15 year old me is drastically different from what 25 year old me thinks. 15 year old me says nothing happened at all, it’s not a bother, he will be fine, why do I have to make such a big deal out of it? He is sure he will be over it entirely by the time he is 30. I am a coward and cannot tell him that I am him, that I will only begin probing what happened at 25, and 30 isn’t doing too hot either.
But it’s not just the big things my past selves disagree on. Little inconsistencies are manifold, as if our life is a poorly written long fanfic. 15 remembers playing with plastic animals and video games but 25 defiantly recalls dolls. I have photos of me, us, with dolls but I am sure we never liked them much. 20 has just thrown out his action figure collection. He is always wanting to throw things away, to purge, to be clean. 30 is starting to collect things. He wants to remember. He is grasping for something more tangible than past me’s memories. Of course I feel closest to him. I made him only a few months ago.
I want to gather myselves up in the tea room by our childhood house, with herbal for me and black tea for the rest, because they can handle the stomach sting of caffeine. We will have dry scones and dried fruit, sit down with laptops and journals before us; the sun will rise, dim, and set around us, food will disappear into reluctant disordered mouths and we will really hash shit out. We will arrive at a damn consensus. At least a cloture. We all need it.
15 will forgive 25 for making sacrifices to his ideals. 30 and 20 will duke it out over what kind of man we want to be and why 20 voted for that renegade guy who loved freedom but banned abortions. 25 will force a hug on 15 and 15 will accept it, collapsing into tears he has not yet learned to need. 30 will forgive 25 for those bloody ribbons on his hips, and I will ask 15 if he knew yet, when it happened, who he was. Or if he only remembers knowing about it afterward, and how does he feel about that. We will all forgive me for taking so long. We will look at our collected histories and comprehend why.
And our childhood. God, our childhood. We will all lean in with dripping hungry mouths to hear 15 recount it. He has the freshest data, and we crave the nutrients he can provide, tainted as it is by his sadness and the hormones surging through his body and the foggy half-development of his myelinating brain. Poor boy, all he gets is people tugging at him, speaking at him, leeching off his life force, and we will do it to, without much regard, because we are not him, we’re us. And we are not the parents he needed, either. Even if we know for damned sure how badly he needed different ones.
We want to see it, crystal clear, as no camera could record it. But his details will confound us, as we confound each other. There’s a reason why the brain can only be backed up once a year at most, and it’s not just the cost and time and hard-drive space involved. It becomes hard to sift through all the information. More information does not a cleaner narrative make. I can barely figure out who I, present day I, am. And I have all the information. But it keeps moving and doubling and fading and I keep forcing little details to be reshaped. It’s a hard thing, trying and needing to make an I out of so many we’s. I don’t know how folks with more selves do it. I don’t know how anyone lives without debating himself all the time.
Our convos will go later than night, into forever, into a time without darkness or light or bodies that can become bruised. Aging me’s will be so furious at us for parsing such small shit, and for not getting what we wanted when our body’s healing time was still short. 20 looks at 30 with such madness. He can’t believe we took so goddamned long to make bold moves. He had it figured out and didn’t give a damn what anybody else wanted. 25 shakes his head. He’s being so unrealistic. He wishes we all understood how hard it is to be him. I remember, and I don’t. He slumps onto the table and tells us he cannot explain it. You’d have to have been there. Nobody gets to be there very long.
The closer one of us is to the past, the less nostalgic he is. 15 hates our questions and doesn’t really want to talk about how he spent middle school or what he thought about when his period arrived. He really doesn’t want to talk about our dead grandmother and how our dead dad grieved her, before he was dead. To him dad isn’t even dead.
We can tell him but it won’t change the past. He’s just a backup. Like an Alzheimer’s patient who gets distressed at the aging face in the mirror, he cannot reckon with the time that’s gone on ahead of him, without him. But in another five years he will be awakened again, paradoxially the oldest and youngest among us, and he will have no memory of the discussion. So we might as well do some harm. Self-harm is familiar to us all. At least we have something in fucking common.
I want to know what kind of child I was. I want to know how I felt when every dead person died. When I suffer a breakup I want them to reassure me it felt just as deathly the last time. But I find myself comforting them instead. 25 is so miserably alone. I tell him he will sustain more pain than he knows, and be the better for it. He cannot parrot that back to me. 20 cannot tell me I might one day live to doubt the politics I am so self-assured and rageful about. Instead I must tell him that, and must not be believed.
I will keep coming every half decade, to raise these ghosts of a living man, until the truth is unearthed. Each backup takes days, a dreamy dangerous fugue. Each visit is too trippy to resume without a buffer of years. When we all meet, I’m torn apart then crammed poorly back together like Play-Doh left on the floor to garher dust and dog hair. I slap myself over the sink each morning and night for months afterward. I need a harder reset.
But it is worth it. I will make it worth it. We will decide who we truly loved and who only hurt us. We will forgive each other for our lazy days and cheer on our rash decisions. The past, the past, the ever-widening past, we will rewrite it, until we find a draft that satisfies the whole committee, that explains and ties up every dangling, spindly thread. And then I will go to my death knowing who I am.
