Solitude
My memory has a specific shape of unreliability. its not about forgetting phone numbers or struggling to hold a long Quran verse in place. it used to be harder to name. It is about people. It is about places. Somewhere in the background of living I was always slightly elsewhere, I used to call it, absent minded, running scenarios, processing, clearing out some cognitive overhead that never fully cleared. And the people around me, and the rooms I sat in, they registered as peripheral. I was there, technically. but I wasn’t looking.and I think it is about that the memory doesn’t fade later, it never fully forms in the first place. that’s the clearest description I have for what I have always felt before. and you can’t retrieve what you didn’t absorb. I spent a lot of time blaming myself for this, as if the problem was a character defect rather than a pattern I could understand and maybe do something about. but the blame didn’t help the gaps fill in, and the gaps kept widening. There are places I have been where I now retain only the feeling. not what anyone looked like. not what the room smelled like or how the light fell. just a general emotional residue, like a color with no shape. places that mattered. people who were real to me. This is a repository. I want to capture what I remember, people, places, fragments of who they were and what it felt like to be near them. before the blur takes the rest of it. some of these I will share. some are just for holding. but the act of writing them down is its own thing, a way of training a muscle that was always a little underdeveloped in me. presence as a practice, even retrospectively. even now, after the fact. it all ends.
Today I went to change my fragrance. the first choice wasn’t available, Bleu de Chanel, gone. so I moved to the second tier, and those weren’t there either. I ended up at the third tier, which is where I found the Afnan Supremacy collection, and after trying another two options or so options, 9PM Afnan, a few others from the Afnan line, I landed on Supremacy Oud, paid, and left.
There is something interesting about a certain kind of people. they are flexible in a way that makes them difficult to categorize. as if they were not built to fit into a single rule, a single system, or a single identity. I still cannot give them a perfect name, because they blend too many traits at once. they are curious, exploratory, internally alive, purposeful, often generalists, and deeply adaptive. they are not built for a narrow lane. they are built for terrain.
I don’t really find myself like everyone else. most times, I have no opinion on almost everything. I have no favorites. I don’t have a stance on almost anything that happens. I get asked, what’s your take on this? what’s your stance? and when I try to investigate myself within, I find none. there is no clear answer.
I told the story of things we never expect to happen to us to a friend today. while listening, he paused and made a simple remark. he asked me why, out of all the people around him, he chose to talk to me about this.
I had not thought about that before.
The question forced me to re examine that friendship, or me and Wren, and the role I played in his life. honestly, it was not much. we enjoyed each other’s company. we hung out only a few times. nothing that would normally qualify as closeness.
The only real distinction between me and many of my friends is that I seek truth as a need, not as a pastime. I have spent most of my life trying to understand the world we live in, its physical reality, its existential questions, and its moral structure. what widens this distinction is that I do not treat understanding as an instrument for enjoyment or intellectual vanity. I seek it because I need it. I need it to make better decisions, and to quiet the confusion that once crowded my mind.