In 2014, I moved across the country to LA.

I was fresh out of undergrad, and had just taken a job as a music archivist. I would spend much of my time over the next two years by myself in a room with boxes of old sheet music, cataloguing what I found.

It was a time of many firsts for me: My first real job, my first time finding an apartment, my first time living on my own, my first time owning a car. I was, in retrospect, in extremely over my head, and it’s small wonder I felt as overwhelmed as I did, but at the time I just felt more unrelentingly stressed than I knew it was possible to feel.

In the middle of this, I discovered that I did not know where to find a pad to make grocery lists on. It was a simple item — a lined pad with a magnet on the back to stick to a fridge — and I thought for sure I could find one anywhere, but to my bewilderment, I could find one nowhere. Somehow — the details are fuzzy at this remove — word of this need made its way to my maternal grandmother, and with great enthusiasm and speed, she mailed me a memo pad.

Within two years, she would be dead.

I don’t really have a way of confirming this, but I remember the memo pad arriving in a flurry of tremendous relief. “Oh thank g-d, I finally know what to get my strange incomprehensible grandchild who lives far away now that they’re too old for the latest Lego set to be the perfect gift! Just this once it’s not a mystery how to be useful and helpful in their life.” Again, I don’t have a way of confirming that, but that’s what I remember it feeling like from my end.

I don’t begrudge that feeling! If anything, I think it’s kind of charming. I know I can be hard to get gifts for, and that my general disinterest in measuring love in material things sits at odds with so much about gift-giving culture in the contemporary United States, full as it is of messages that when someone says they don’t want anything, what they really mean is that secretly they do want something, but it’s a Test to see if you know them well enough to figure out what. So when something like the memo pad comes up, something where someone who wants to give me something can get me something that I need but haven’t been able to get for myself, it’s honestly kind of a relief. They get the satisfaction of a gift well given, I get something I need, everybody wins.

Maybe that’s kind of mercenary. I don’t know. As I said, I don’t really measure love in material things; the language of gifts isn’t one I speak with very much fluency, but I do care if the people around me are happy.

I don’t know that I would say that I am a naturally, or even particularly, thrifty person, but I do like to get a good use out of things before I let them go. I emphatically dislike waste. (If I don’t have a jar for “pieces of string too short to be worth saving”, it’s only because I don’t regularly use lengths of string in my daily life.) It turns out you can fit six grocery lists on any given sheet from the memo pad my grandmother sent me: two on the front and four on the back. Six years later, and I’m only now coming to the end: This Sunday, I’ll pull off the final sheet. Five weeks later, the pad will be used up for good. Barring any unforeseen deviations in my schedule, the last sheet will carry its last list on Sunday, 1 November, 2020.

Not too shabby for a spur-of-the-moment gift.

LA was a complicated time for me.

It was, in many ways, the freest, and also stablest, I had ever been in my life. My job paid enough to live on comfortably, I had no deadlines of any sort to speak of, I could build a schedule for myself on my own terms and follow it to my heart’s content. I spent most of my days alone, alternating between my apartment, the five-minute commute in my car, and a floor of a building empty except for several thousand boxes of sheet music from the middle of the twentieth century and a computer to log them in. There were months where the only in-person interaction I had was with the workers at the grocery stores I frequented in Little Armenia, who got to know me and my clockwork regularity pretty well by the end of my two years there.

After the tumultuous pressure cooker of Yale, this felt like safety, like a chrysalis, where I could isolate myself from the flux and turn inwards, process everything I had not had time to process over the last four (or more) years, figure things out that should have been figured out a long time ago. Things about my gender and sexuality, yes, but also about my mental health, my politics, what kind of a person I wanted to be in the world. I could have been anyone, become anyone. I became the person who would ultimately turn into me.

At the time, I know, or at least I think I remember, mostly feeling the dizzying existential freedom of it all. You can just make choices! There’s no one and nothing to stop you! Even if those choices are terrible and rash and foolhardy! I remember driving back from Pasadena one night and seeing an exit sign for a highway to Sacramento and realizing that there was nothing, absolutely nothing stopping me from taking that exit, driving to Sacramento, driving on, further and further, off into the distance, off into the distance, off until I ran out of road. There would be consequences, to be sure, but they would be my consequences, mine just as much as they would be if I chose to drive back to my apartment instead. (I went home. I am a creature of habit, in the end.)

In retrospect, now, I can only think of how desperately sad I was.

I don’t really like that fact. It feels maudlin, trite, like it re-enforces a tedious and dull stereotype of trans life that will be picked up and trotted out either by well-meaning allies or by trans antagonists to paint a fundamentally misleading picture of What It’s Like to ^be^ trans, but it is, alas, true. I was terribly unhappy in LA.

(This is, incidentally, one of the reasons I am so resistant to autobiography, so uninterested in making art about my own life. If I describe my experiences in terms that are precise, but clinical — I was depressed, dysphoric, constantly dissociating — I name the experience but do not convey it. If I use my craft to find words that actually convey the feeling itself — I was moving every day thru clear and viscous slime, cold and cloying and choking, so frigid and constant that my nerves stopped feeling it, so lucid that my eyes stopped seeing it, noticeable only in hindsight by the warmth and freedom of its absence — people tell me I have made something beautiful, moving, profound. The point of a scream is not to be beautiful. The point of a scream is to tell you that there is a creature in pain, to tell you to do something about this suffering. All this blood wasn’t ever poetry, it’s just blood, it’s just blood, it’s just blood.)

Again, at the time I didn’t fully realize this. I mostly notice it in flashback, when something reminds me of my time there. Riding a bus instead of the subway, a certain kind of tree-lined avenue, a specific scent on the summer air and I’m plunged back into a grief so thick it chokes me, a sorrow so profound I can barely move. I nearly broke down in tears when I got the e-mail telling me I had been accepted to grad school in New York.

It wasn’t so much the place or the people as the specific moment in my life when I was there: My final gasp of living publicly as a man and privately as trans, while coming to accept that I actually was mentally ill (and not just stressed by term papers) and struggling to find connection when most of my friends, for me, existed primarily online, and in a different time zone at that.

It was a place and time of tremendous growth for me; I couldn’t be here without having gone thru there, but I wouldn’t ever want to go back.

In truth, tho, I almost never think about LA. I almost never think about any of my past. I almost never remember any of it.

That’s less pleasant than it maybe sounds.

I exist in a dissociated, disorientated eternal present, where things as they are are things as they have always been, and thus are things as they always will be. My memories exist in a disordered, achronological jumble, without logic, without sequence, without narrative tether. I can go back to about January and recall events in sequence, but before that, everything is level. I only know my high school memories are earlier than my college ones because I know, intellectually, that I went to high school before I went to college. But they feel simultaneous. Without context clues, I have no way of placing the events of my life in time.

Shortly before she died, my grandmother called my on the phone. We spoke briefly, maybe for ten or fifteen minutes. We talked about my application to grad school. She said she couldn’t always understand my Facebook posts, but that she always loved hearing my voice, “because it’s always so strong”. I told her that I loved her. I don’t know when the last time I saw her in person was. I would have to do a lot of detective work to figure it out.

That conversation happened on the thirteenth of February, 2016. I know this because I wrote a little note about it with a few details.

I am constantly writing down little notes about my life. At the end of every day (except, these days, on days when my religious practice precludes it), I jot down three things that happened during the day on the square of my calendar before going to bed. I date my composition sketches, put timestamps in my diary, sometimes clarify in e-mails to myself that a given thing was written a few days earlier and I’m just typing it up now. I prefer to keep these all as hard copies because then I know no one’s coming in and changing the dates — when I need to find something, to figure out when something actually happened, I can go spelunking, combing thru these traces to find a trace of it. “OK, this happened in LA, so let me pull things from June of 2014 to July of 2016 and try to find it.” “This was during my thesis project, so it must have been the spring of 2018. What does the calendar say?”

Often I am wrong. I thought that conversation with my grandmother happened in the summer of 2015. But the date is unequivocal. I only thought it happened then because that’s about the middle of my time in LA, and my brain thinks that everything that isn’t specifically associated with arriving or leaving that city happened more or less simultaneously, right in the middle, in an undifferentiated wash.

Or I’ll find things that I’ve forgotten. For years, I thought that I started having a specific bad sleep pattern in LA, one associated with migraines. I thought it was a consequence of living just off a freeway and never getting used to the noise. And then I went thru my archive looking for something quite unrelated and stumbled on notes from my senior year of undergrad, a full year before the move, complaining explicitly about exactly the same thing. So now I don’t know when it started. Sometime before 2013, obviously, but I have no memory of it, no memory of it at all, because I didn’t write it down. It’s just gone. (And indeed, even the experience of what it was like before January is difficult to recover now. I started taking a new pill that helped significantly with the severity of the migraines, and now my brain refuses to believe they were ever any worse than they are now. It takes active work to remind myself that ten months ago, things were different. If I didn’t have my own written accounts, I’m not sure I’d be able to. My own memories are useless here.)

I don’t like doing this. Seeing my own handwriting meticulously documenting events I have no memory of in a sequence I cannot vouch for is one of the less pleasant experiences I’ve repeatedly had. It’s not dissimilar to the creeping feeling of wrongness associated with the Mandela Effect, like going swimming in the river that carved out the uncanny valley. Intellectually, I know and agree that these things all must have happened as the evidence of my own hands attests that they did; internally, my psyche cannot integrate this information and screams at me to get out of there as fast as I can.

It’s actually not just written things. It’s everything. I don’t like remembering the past, because the past doesn’t feel like it’s mine.

Every so often — call it every 18 months, tho it can be up to two years or as little as one; there’s no regular periodicity here — I go over a disjunct, a hiccup, a discontinuity in my experience of myself. It’s like the software that is my mind gets rebooted, dissolves into ether and has to be reconstituted, recompiled from its source code again. (That’s the version of it I tell in polite society, at least. It’s not my preferred metaphor. What it’s really like is dying, and then coming to be again as a different person in a grinding, protracted cycle of annihilation and revivification. Which is, of course, ridiculous, because I’ve never actually died, so how can I know what it’s like? But those are the most honest words I have for the experience of it. I can’t make it make sense, I can only do my best to chronicle it.)

And every time I go over one of these disjuncts, it’s like I have to start from scratch. Here I am — where am I? I have this apartment, it’s full of stuff — whose stuff? My stuff? I guess it’s mine now, I guess it must be. I guess I inherited it from the person whose place I took. And — oh g-d — I’m also in the middle of all these relationships (dating, friendships, collaborations, colleagueships, what have you)? Who am I to all these people? Who are they to me? Each time I encounter someone, something anew, I have to try and reconnect everything, put everything back together. I have to tap into these memories that I’ve inherited — someone else’s memories, it feels like, someone else’s memories that just got loaded into my brain, someone else’s memories whose place I now have to take — and figure it all out and keep everything going until my life feels like mine again.

But, of course, some people I don’t interact with very often. Some books sit on my shelves for years unread. And with each disjunct, the memories of them become harder to recover, more alien to me, closer to being lost forever if they aren’t written down.

My past doesn’t feel like a disordered jumble, it feels like a fiction, like a novel I read or a show I watched, no more or less real than a story someone told me once that stuck with me.

I have no idea how much I’ve forgotten.

My grandmother and I never really talked about religion, about G-d. I know she was a Christian Scientist, and that she got more devout towards the end of her life. I was functionally an atheist for the entire time she knew me, altho by the time she died, I was already decidedly turning towards Judaism. Her death was one of the things that pushed me closer.

She lived, as far as I could tell, a long full life, and she died, as far as I could tell, a death on her own terms. It wasn’t a sudden or unexpected death, not a death where she had no time to get her affairs in order, no time to say goodbye to those she loved. I don’t know if there is such a thing as a good death, but I think there are probably worse deaths than that.

And so I wasn’t really distraught when she died. There are a lot of great secular resources out there for dealing with grief, for processing the heavy, traumatic emotions of sadness and loss, but that wasn’t what I needed. I wasn’t grieving, not exactly. I needed a ritual, some way of marking that there had been a human who I had loved, and who had lived as good a life as she was able, and now that life was finished, complete. Secular communities had little to offer for something like that; I suspected Judaism would have more available.

Had I known then what I know now, I would have said Kaddish for her. I keep meaning to look up the specific date of her yahrtzeit, but that would involve trawling thru archives from four years ago, and I keep not remembering, or not quite having the stamina. Someday I will. Someday I will.

The other week, I needed a new blank notebook. For a moment, I thought I might actually have to buy one (could you imagine?), but then I noticed that there, on the shelf, was a totally blank spiral notebook free for the filling.

I have no memory of buying this notebook. I have no idea when or how it entered my possession. I assume some past iteration of me bought it for some purpose and then never used it, but I cannot for the life of me imagine what. From the brand and style, I can infer that I must have bought it sometime between the tail end of my high school years and the early months of my grad school experience, but that’s a decade-long swath of time, and I have no way to narrow it down beyond that. (At some point it got a little water damaged. Have I forgotten a flood? It’s possible. I forgot an entire abusive relationship; forgetting a flood doesn’t seem that extreme.)

I felt a little guilty pulling it down off the shelf, the way I always do when I start using something that I haven’t used for a few reboots. Like, for all I know, some high schooler or some college student purchased this to put their dreams in, who am I to take it and use it for my own ends just because they died and I inherited their stuff? It feels creepy, disrespectful. Pilfering the things of the dead for my own use? Gross. And yet it’s not like it does anyone good to leave a blank notebook collecting dust on the shelf. There aren’t any memories in it. There aren’t even any memories about it. It’s an object for use, it should be used, not kept as an uncanny mausoleum piece. If I preserved every fragment of every past self instead of using them for my own ends, I’d soon enough be living in a crypt.

So my grandmother died, and every six weeks, give or take, I’d start a new sheet on the memo pad. And I’d think of her. This is the pad my grandmother gave me, so I could make grocery lists, when I was living in LA. It feels like a tether, keeping her memory alive for me, stopping it from getting swallowed up in the constant dissolution that is my actual past. And now I’m at the end of it. Now this object, this physical thing that has been with me for six years, across an entire continent, in three apartments, two full-time jobs, my entire Master’s degree, my public transition, my ongoing path into Judaism, more disjuncts than I care to number— It’s about to be used up, finished. Complete. This thing that has been in my life longer than half my kitchenware, most of my wardrobe, and all of my Judaica, this thing that’s been around longer than I have been (if you will, for the moment, accept that it just does feel like I, the present me, came into being in January after the previous iteration of me died) is about to be no more. It feels like a plank in the wood floor of my life is falling away, and I don’t know what is going to replace it. Maybe nothing will. Maybe the two halves on either side will just scoot closer and close the gap, seamlessly, showing no trace there was ever anything there to begin with. I’m sure it’s happened many times before.

I don’t know what will happen to my memories of my grandmother. Probably they’ll fade once I’m no longer reminding myself of them every week. Or, not fade, really, but be eaten up, glitched out of existence the next time I hiccup over a disjunct. I don’t think there’s anything I can do about it. Her relationship to me will go from being a memory to being an abstract fact, known to me only in the same way I know the family trees of my favorite characters. I’m sorry, grandma. It’s not personal. My mind just swallows things.

The last thing my grandmother ever wrote to me (probably) was a message on my Facebook wall wishing me a happy birthday, and it included my deadname. I mean, it wasn’t really my deadname at the time, I guess — I don’t remember exactly when and how I switched over from one name to the other informally (it’s written down, I just didn’t bother looking it up for this post; sometime between February of 2014 and April of 2016, that’s all I’ve got) — but it’s the name that’s become unquestionably my deadname in the time since.

I say I really hate being deadnamed, and I think cis people get that intellectually, but maybe not emotionally. Probably, if you’ve read this far, you can guess that not only does it have to do with not wanting to be misgendered, but it also has to do with not wanting to be hurled back, with no warning, thrown off a cliff into the uncanny valley of my own memories. The bewildering reminder of my own past is almost more viscerally upsetting, to me, than being called a man.

To get the viscerality of the emotion across, sometimes I say that if I had one wish, it would be to obliterate my deadname in the etymological sense, to blot the letters out, to make it not just unknown, but Unknowable, a secret not contained in even the farthest depths of the universe. But that feels, perhaps, still a little too abstract. So how’s this:

The last thing my grandmother ever wrote to me (probably) was a message on my Facebook wall wishing me a happy birthday, and it included my deadname. When I was going thru my Facebook history looking for posts with my deadname in them, I found that post. I found that post, and I thought about how much my grandmother loved me, about how much I loved her. I thought about how many generations of people across all of time had lost their loved ones to death with no record of their final words, no last message to hold onto in any fixed form, just the ever fading memories as the present rushes headlong into the past. I thought of all of that, and then, without hesitating or thinking twice, I deleted that post without so much as taking a screenshot. That is how much I hate my deadname.

I’m a ship of Theseus; don’t ask me where I got my sails.

I bought myself a new memo pad. It turns out you can just get them at Staples for a couple dollars. (A little extra for shipping because pandemic, but still.) I found one that was Oregon themed, because that’s where my grandmother lived for all the days of my life. I hope it’ll help me keep the memories of her feeling like mine. Maybe it will. I’m not optimistic.

It’s got exactly 52 pages, so assuming my schedule keeps on uninterrupted, it should last me thru to nearly the end of 2026.

I have no idea who I’ll be by then. I feel like I could dissolve at any moment, become someone entirely new, unrecognizable to myself, someone who will have inherited my things, but none of my projects. I have always felt this way. (I think. Maybe I’ve only felt this way since January. I haven’t looked it up.)

But I know I’ll still need to eat. I know I’ll still need to buy groceries. I know that pad will still be useful.

Those are things that I know. There are things that I hope, too, many things. Too many things to put here, so I will simply put down one:

In 2026, hope I still remember my grandmother.

This post is dedicated to the memory of my grandmother, Elaine Green. May her memory be for a blessing.