I hope I become a better memory for you.

Photo: The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí

No one would believe me if I said that three years ago to this day, I was stuck in a world that was crashing down on me in slow motion. On this day, I would receive the results of my tests - cancer - though no one would say the words to me. The same day I received my diagnosis, and this is a lesser-known story, I went to speak to my new manager because I had moved back home for a new role. My new company had already been waiting for me for four months by this point. Now I had to have yet another conversation with him, telling him about my…not-so-minor hurdle.

I think about that time in fragments, splintered by the trauma of experiencing horror that the mind is unable to comprehend. Fragments that come to me at strange moments, as if now, my brain, three years on, is learning to release its stronghold, white-knuckled grip on the memories that it wasn’t ready to sift through. I see my brain, this beating, twitching mass, finally breathing out, and wisps of cloud - smoky, some green, some grey - move into the air. I see it beating, and now the colour morphs to red, and I see the veins and capillaries of my heart, the blood, the fist-sized organ, and it blurs again, my heart and mind.

This happens often. My memories transmute themselves. Sometimes I am in the present, and then, in a breath, I am somewhere else, brought back to another place and another time, where I was somebody else.

I see it reflected most clearly in my eyes. I don’t know if you can see it, but my eyes are spacier now; my sight drifts with my mind, with the pumping of my heart, with the release of my memories into the ether. I see it when I am looking at myself in the mirror - I witness myself moving somewhere else.

I think of it as my new magic, bending time to my will, because the alternative - the more medical explanations of how my brain and heart shift inside of me - I don’t want to go into that. I don’t know if I can.

The lesser-known story is that three weeks after I came back to work, my head bald as a baby’s bum, I received news that I had been let go. I think of this now and feel hysterical laughter bubbling in my throat, because imagine the assault to my senses, imagine the assault to my identity - first the loss of trust between my body and me, then the loss of my closely held identity, my work self. I think back to those days, how I fled the country because I had three months and didn’t really need to think about work; about how I sent out 20 job applications the moment I received my retrenchment letter; how I sat and cried and cried because I didn’t know anything about this new world - of unemployment, of recovery, of baldness - none of it.

My husband always recounts this story with a sense of bewilderment - about how I never stopped, about how I just kept going, barreling into solution after solution, despite the fact that the rug had been pulled out from under my feet yet again. He shakes his head with confusion when he says, she never considered stopping.

I don’t know how to stop.

It has been three years since 12 October 2022. My hair has grown out; I have little tawdry curls that I worry between my fingers when I am tired, or when I am thinking, and when I shake my head, my blue-green hair brushes against the side of my ears. My eyebrows are still scanty and my eyelashes have never fully recovered, but the rest of me presents well, and I laugh, because I feel like a magician again, shapeshifting into normalcy, carrying a maelstrom of colours and spirits inside of me.

I like the idea that this existence is ephemeral. I understand you may call me a coward for saying that, but I really do believe in the fleeting manner in which life happens. People live, and people die. People have children, and sometimes those children die before their parents. People fall ill and recover. Some people fall and never rise. It all happens in the blink of an eye.

The same spacey eye, where the white now extends a little more into the corner, the black more brown - do eyes change when they have seen too much of the world, not just the outside world, but the inner world?

I close my eyes; they are gritty from the lack of sleep. I have been travelling - I am often travelling these days for work: new work, more work, different work. Work too is ephemeral, perhaps the most fleeting of it all, because nothing actually matters, and often we believe everything matters, constantly, all the time.

I am sitting on a bus, and I lift my eyes up to the sky, and I see three birds careening through clouds - clouds as wispy as my memories - the flight of the birds as real as my flight away from pain, and my flight towards recovery.

In the time it takes me to finish writing this, another three years will have passed. I hope I become a better memory for you.