There is a special place in my mind that I visit when I need to remember myself. It’s a wasteland of fragmented memories, and every corner is haunted by the ghosts of dreams I’ve outgrown or convinced myself I don’t want anymore. Their faces are pale and distorted. I feel them lurking in the shadows, glowering, waiting to be realized. All of my discarded ambitions hang from the rafts like sleeping bats, angry but dormant.

I feel my way along the walls, bumping into boxes, chests, and picture frames until my fingertips run across grooves of splintered wood. I tear down ancient boards from a circular window pane. Sunlight streams in like an epiphany, and its truth is blinding. I have been gone too long. Flurries of fine particles are sent into the morning light, disturbed by my presence. The dust is important, and reminds me that time does not stand still, it just adds up. I watch the shimmering curtain of dust motes caught in a pillar of sunlight, lingering there as if the air is so heavy.

After a lifetime in exile, the attic itself groans and settles before me. Every moment I have ever lived lies lonely and neglected in photo albums, journals, and heavy suitcases. My childhood is slowly rotting, smelling like summertime sweat and moldy tangerines near the classical guitar I stopped playing in the high school. My adolescence has been shamefully stuffed away into yellowing diaries and naive love letters. All my past is here, decaying and untouched. How is it that I’ve lived so many lives, and left them all behind?