Autobiographical Dream #1

More about Autobiographical Dream #1

She had lived her life with a sense of quiet estrangement, the kind that doesn’t roar or announce itself—but instead hums beneath the surface like a forgotten melody. There were years that simply didn’t exist anymore, entire stretches of her childhood that had dissolved without consent. Family members spoke of places, names, events that should have belonged to her memory, but they floated past her like foreign words—soft, alien, untranslatable.

It wasn’t forgetfulness. Forgetfulness is passive, even mundane. This was absence. Active, hollow, deliberate not by will but by some internal, unconscious survival mechanism that had deemed parts of her story too dangerous to hold. And so, piece by piece, the narrative disassembled itself, rewound, and folded into silence.

She never tried to remember. Not because she lacked curiosity, but because some part of her knew that any attempt to retrieve the light would also unearth the shadow. To recall the sweetness of a moment might mean tasting again the bitterness that followed. And so she kept the lid closed—not in denial, but in wary self-preservation.

The missing puzzle piece in her chest wasn’t just a metaphor—it was a weight she carried, visible only in moments of stillness. In conversations where laughter rang and nostalgia danced freely in others' eyes, she sat, smiling politely, echoing emotions she couldn’t truly feel.

There’s a particular ache in not knowing who you were. It’s not quite grief—grief implies the memory of what’s lost. This was something else: a restless incompleteness. A door left open to a room whose contents had vanished, leaving only the impression of dust.

Still, she lived. With grace. With curiosity. With an ache that no one saw. And every so often, in the quiet moments when the world softened, she’d feel the shape of the missing piece pressing gently from within—not asking to be found, only to be honored.