December
On being an archivist and unearthing my own memories.
One thing you learn as an archivist is that a document is only worthy if its context of production has been preserved. What use can be made of a map without a title, when nobody can tell what building is represented, or whether it is still up or not? What about a letter without a signature, a date, or a recipient? And yet, there are so many of those documents stored in every archive repository around the world, untethered, kept and yet lost. Without a description attached to them, no one able to tell they’re here to begin with, no one who knows to look for them.
So many of my memories have lost their context, have become untethered. Pictures with no inscription on the back to tell you who the people in them were and what they meant. There’s data missing for most of my teens and my early adulthood. I don’t know how I stopped talking to my high school friends and I don’t know how long my first relationship lasted. I don’t know how many times I was hospitalised and I don’t remember most of what I was taught during my first masters’ degree.
The thing is, for most of these, the data still exists. There are messages stored in social media apps, there are diaries, and a medical file, the physical document of my dissertation. If I don’t remember willingly severing the ties with those years, I’ve also done nothing to pick up the pieces.
Day after day at work, I add context to things that have lost their meaning. I find back dates and titles, I put names on faces. And then I go home and I forget. I forget the names of my coworkers and the faces of my friends, the content of my last meaningful conversation, the lyrics to my favourite songs. It took me a while to realise how unmoored I felt, how many years had become islands in my mind I couldn’t reach anymore. It scared me. Which lands have I completely forgotten, buried beneath piles of inconsequential stuff that somehow have remained? I never took the time to put words to them and they drifted away. Sometimes, something will wash up to shore, polished by the elements until it has become unrecognisable from the thing it once was. I will pick it up, inspect it. Sometimes, I will remember. Sometimes, I won’t. Sometimes, it stirs something within and I throw it back towards the sea so I don’t have to look at it anymore.
These days, I log everything. It’s compulsive. I need data written on paper, tangible, indelible. I need numbers and dates. I draw graphs and fill Excel sheets with futile statistics. I keep apps on my phone to log the books I’ve read, and the films I’ve watched, the comics I bought, the music I listened to. I spend hours every week recreating a detailed timetable of everything that has happened before it slips away from me. It’s the end of the year and I’m compiling all this data, trying to make sense of it all, trying to shape it into the life I’ve lived throughout the last twelve months. Diary entries and poems lost in my notes app, the notebook I keep at work, every tweet and every Instagram story. It feels like a safety jacket. I can’t sink if it’s all there, I can’t disappear underneath the dark water, with nothing left of me for others to find.
Some days still get lost. Days when the water has submerged me, left me no room to breathe. I don’t think there’s much happening on those days, but it’s still something I can’t track. It’s another thing they teach you. There’s history in the absence of archives the same way as in their abundance. The work of a historian is to explain the emptiness just as much as it is to interpret what is there. Was it destroyed or was it never written? Does it still exist, but in somebody’s attic, picking up dust? Is it one of those thousands of untethered documents that no one could identify when they first discovered them? How do I tell the story of those blank pages? Should I even try to tell it? Maybe I spend too much time thinking about those absences. I look at the glass half empty and wondered who drank from it, who took what from me, instead of looking at what is still there.
It's the end of December. I lost three days again. Three days that had been planned, a Christmas dinner I should have gone to, family I should have seen. Three days spent in my bed, covered in the blanket of all I know, trying to hide from all I don’t. I’d like to pretend I’ll be able to let go of them, to focus on the celebrations I was able to attend, the people I was able to see. And yet, here we are, with 800 more words about what was lost at sea.