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Last night, I dreamed—though I can’t tell you what of, not exactly. There were fragments. A lawn, half-mown, or cats—dozens of them, maybe. Their shapes flicker now at the edge of memory, insubstantial. That’s how it always goes. I dream every night, I know this, but each one slips through my fingers by morning, evaporating like steam before I can grasp it.
It wasn’t always this way. As a child, I kept a dream journal. Religious about it. Woke up, wrote it down. And something about that changed me. Sharpened the recall, made dreams more solid. Realer. And then, over time, something turned. Now they vanish even faster. Like the act of remembering too hard wore out the muscle.
I’ve thought about starting again. Journaling. Documenting. Not just the dreams, but the moments around them—the texture of waking, the taste of forgetting. Because vivid dreams begin with remembering, don’t they?
But I hate recollection. The way it drags old feelings back up, stale and bitter. The way it stains the present with shadows of things that never happened. There’s something foul in remembering too much.
Still. Maybe I’ll try.
Jun 7, 2025
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Anyone close to me knows that I’m really into recording my dreams and that I love talking about it, specifically how it has done wonders for my memory. I’ve been obsessed with dream phenomena since I was a kid since I’ve always had insanely vivid dreams and can honestly separate my life into chapters based on the recurring dream I was having at the time. I was really into dream journaling when I was a teenager, and then I switched over to recording my dreams in my voice memos app during 2020, but I’ve kinda fallen off in more recent years. But every morning, I try to at least recall my dream to myself, even if just an inkling of what I thought I might’ve just dreamt. And more often than not, when I go back to bed later on that night, get in my usual sleeping position and close my eyes, I can usually remember at least the general essence of the dream I had the previous night. I think that recording my dreams has really improved my memory overall. I also just think it’s really fun and interesting, even though about 70% of my dreams are stress-inducing or consist of my deepest subconscious thoughts, insecurities and fears being thrown in my face :)
Aug 9, 2024
I can’t call these dreams memorable, but they are recent. I write them down in a sleepy stupor immediately upon waking up and then forget ever having them. I recognize it when I read it back but rarely recall them throughout the day without checking my dream journal.
May 23, 2025
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i love the feeling of something jumpstarting the memory, then getting more and more pieces like patchwork
May 7, 2025
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I unblocked him today. Stupid, really. A gesture that meant nothing and everything at once—flick of a finger, avalanche of consequence. I don’t love him. I know this the way I know fire burns and poison kills. But there was a time I did. Or at least, I believed I did, which might be the same thing.
And now, in the pit of night, he comes back. Not in memory, which I could handle. In dreams. Those cursed, wretched dreams where love feels like a trick played on me by some malevolent god. We are soft together, whole together. It feels real. Worse: it feels good. I wake up gagging on it. That intimacy, that false safety. My brain taunts me with what could have been, and I can’t even scream back.
So I dissociate. That’s the clinical word for it. But really, I haunt myself. I float through the day like a ghost freshly exhumed, skin buzzing with sleep that clings to my body like mold. Am I still dreaming? Has waking up ever felt this fake?
I ask myself: Do I still love him?
Then a worse question: Did I ever?
And the worst of all: Did I make it up, the whole damn thing?
Because if I did—if I built it all out of nothing, like straw houses and paper people—then maybe I am what he always said I was. A liar. A little girl who makes up stories and calls it truth. My father’s daughter.
And that’s the most disgusting thing of all.
Jun 7, 2025
I hang your jackets in my closet like trophies, or maybe like warnings. I don’t know which. I don’t wear them. It’s far too hot — sticky, oppressive heat that clings to the skin like regret — but I keep them there, row by row, like memory has a dress code. The scent is gone now. That clean, clove-sweet sharpness you always carried. Still, I walk past them every day. I make myself look.
It’s supposed to mean something. All of this. I keep telling myself I’m meant for something bigger — to make a name for myself, they always say — but what name? The one I was given, or the one I’ll have to carve out with blood and trembling hands? Fifty-five years. Fifty-five steps to the top of the hill, up to that damn library where I’ve been meaning to go. Where I keep meaning to go.
And yet. I don’t move.
My legs work. I know they do. They carried me through worse things — war zones of the heart, ancestral curses, kitchens full of shattered plates. But I still can’t make them climb. I don’t know if that makes me weak or merciful. I don’t know if it’s sabotage or a mercy I don’t deserve.
A dog that weeps after it kills is still a killer. A dog that weeps is still a dog.
Your guilt won’t make you holy. Your regret won’t make you clean.
So I ask: when you see a butterfly land on lavender — that momentary grace, delicate and impossible — do you still spell my name in your head, as if that might bring me back? As if I ever left?
May 28, 2025
Why would you do that to me?
I keep trying to locate the moment everything broke. Like it’s a pin on a map I can circle in red. But there is no clear shatterpoint—no clean fracture, no dramatic climax. Just pressure. Gradual. Relentless. Until one day, I couldn’t carry it anymore and I don’t even remember deciding to drop it.
Maybe the line was never drawn.
Maybe I was never taught I could draw one.
Is that my fault? His? Does fault even matter?
Was it an accident? Was it cruelty? Was it just the consequence of being small in a world that teaches people to take what they want?
I don’t know.
And I’m learning to live with not knowing.
But lately—strangely—I think I’m healing.
Not all at once. Not dramatically. But quietly, like the way snow melts: slow and almost imperceptible, until suddenly there’s grass again.
I’m letting go of the obsessions that gnawed at me.
I have energy again, like I finally remembered how to move.
I’m picking up pieces of old joy, half-buried but still intact.
I’m remembering the things I loved. The things that loved me back.
And maybe, most importantly,
I’m forgetting the things that never really mattered at all.
Jun 9, 2025