First person, past tense. Third person, present tense?
“It is amazing the little things you remember.“ I hear that a lot. I have to explain to people I didn’t completely lose my [tag]memory[/tag]. There is a definite event horizon with a peak that has an almost tangible slope down hill from that point where my [tag]recognition[/tag] seems to get murky and black. At one point the best analogue would have been to say that the c.d. just sometimes skipped, but thats not exactly true. I have a somewhat better representation. If you took a clean pair of glasses that was my mind before the seizures. I had a pretty good sense of recall. then you took both of your thumbs and licked them and placed them near the center of your field of vision leaving wet thumb prints. The initial smudges would be impossible to see through but if you looked around the edges you could see. Thats my far past, my childhood, that I can recall, but My near [tag]past[/tag] is smudged, and the closer I get the worse the smudges are until I get to the point where I can’t see at all around January to June of 07. I have pictures and things I have written and all I get is a vague sense of deja-vu. Even now when I read my notes it seems like I am peeking in on someone else’s thoughts and secrets. When my friends tell me stories at parties I have to play along or fill in details that I have heard from someone else or read their body language and use context clues. I have to ask about people I have known for years or wait till it is quiet to ask about people I have just met because I forgot everything they just told me.
My short term memory is still spotty even after six months. I sometimes substitute words even when I know the correct terminology but I freeze up in conversation because I can’t recall the exact phrase quickly enough. It gets old extremely quickly, and I grow tired of having to explain my problems to people. Even the condensed version is starting to take to long to explain. There is no fast easy way to explain to people why the person they remember as being in near perfect health no longer has any short term memory, or twitches when stressed.
One day I would like to read my journal and be able to clearly recall what happened and not feel like I should be referring to the person in those notes in the third person past tense.
