I can’t remember a lot of things I do, Anon. I suffer from depression and severe, chronic exhaustion, not to mention allergies that are slowly making it highly difficult to live here. …no wait, that part already happened.
Exhaustion and/or depression affects the brain’s ability to take short-term memories and put them in the long-term storage banks. That’s just basic science.
Before you take that and run laughing along to your bin of…doubt? Agnostic feels place? Skeptism city? (I do not actually know where you were going with that last line, so if it’s not meant as an insult, I apologize.) Bear in mind that a great deal of “para”normal things happened to me before I moved to this vast liminal space. Before the chronic exhaustion and depression that fucks with my day-to-day “Did I do the thing” memories.
Yes, people forget things. But people also remember when things are not right. We know it .We feel it. We sense it.
Yes, someone with memory difficulties or mental health issues should attempt to see a doctor–which is not always possible in the United States. I don’t know where you’re from, Anon, but mental health assessment is EXTREMELY difficult to get in…well, most of this entire fucking country.
We know to get our shit checked. Most of us don’t need someone to tell us that, Anon. That doesn’t mean that something else isn’t also happening.
It’s the eyes on your back, the hair rising on your arms, the cold chill on your neck. It’s the sensation that while you sometimes forget, you know that it was not your hands that did the thing you are now looking at.
Anon, once upon a time, I lost a treasured ring in the backseat of my old SUV. We were traveling on the interstate at the time, and even though it just fell from my hands, it had vanished. Nowhere to be found. I looked everywhere. I practically tore that vehicle apart during our next stop. It was not there.
Fast-forward to many years later. In that time, the inside of the SUV has been professionally cleaned many times. When a vehicle is professionally cleaned, every single crevice is explored, scraped clean, sanitized, vacuumed–the works. I’m finally putting the SUV up for sale, since it’s become a trainwreck (not literally) of a vehicle.
As I’m cleaning out the last bits of our personal belongings, I open the door to the backseat.
Sitting in plain sight on the floor is the ring I’d lost five years before.
It had not been there yesterday. It had not been there last year. It had not been there at all, not since that moment it fell from my hands while traveling on the interstate.
There is literally no way it could have gotten there, but for one thing: I was actively searching with the intent of removing all of *my* personal belongings from the truck. The ring was a personal belonging…so there it was.
Someone come along and tell me that is fucking Alzheimer’s. I’ll laugh at you.