There was always something slightly off. Not wrong enough to name. Not loud enough to investigate. A low hum underneath everything that I assumed was just the texture of being alive.
For a long time I thought that was the whole of it — a faint, permanent off-ness everyone must feel and most people simply ignore. It was only much later that I understood the off-ness wasn’t the problem. It was the symptom. The thing underneath was stranger, and harder to explain.
I could remember my life with complete accuracy and feel almost none of it.
Ask me what happened at the birth of one of my children and I could give it to you like a medical record — every detail preserved, the sequence exact. The feeling that should have come with it wasn’t there. Not faded. Not buried. Absent. As though the events had been recorded by a very good camera with the sound switched off.
I didn’t know that was unusual. You don’t, when it’s the only way you’ve ever experienced anything. I assumed everyone felt life at this distance — one step back, narrating rather than living, producing the appropriate response because the genuine one never quite arrived. I had a whole bank of those responses, observed and catalogued over decades: this is what surprise looks like, this is what warmth looks like, this is what you say when someone tells you good news. Deployed on cue. Convincing enough to fool almost everyone.
Including me.
I can place roughly when the sound went off. Somewhere around seven. Before that there are memories that still carry their feeling fully intact — a voice singing in another room, a bicycle by a Christmas tree, the specific safety of being small and loved. After that, the record continues and the feeling stops.
I didn’t lose those decades to sadness. Sadness would have been something. I lost them to a kind of flat competence — getting things done, moving forward, building a life that looked complete from the outside and felt, from the inside, like watching it through glass.
The grief, when it finally came, wasn’t for any single thing that happened to me. It was for how completely I’d accepted that the glass was just what living looked like.
