The day I forgot everything was a beautiful one. The birds, I could actually hear them without calling them birds. I could see things without needing to give them a name, and that mind that was so convincingly selling me horror stories by the day, was now nothing more than air. Lightness and air.

Whenever I would have some dark thought, some worried thought about how something was wrong, might go wrong and I’d have to fix it, then sometimes I would suddenly forget. I would forget what I was thinking about, and there would be a space, clear and empty. Then something would rise up in my head. “What was I thinking about?” I would grow uncomfortable that I couldn’t remember what was troubling me. It must have been important. What if I never remembered it again? I won’t be able to fix what’s wrong, I won’t be able to turn the bad into the good, I might just end up on my knees, with the world ready to chop off my head once and for all.

And usually I would breathe a sigh of relief as I remembered again, as I remembered my problem, what I was worried about, and a sense of security seemed to emerge when I was once again engaged with some kind of darkness, some kind of mistrust of this life I seemed to have been born into.

But one day, I forgot, and I didn’t chase it back. I didn’t search and seek to remember what I was worrying about, and it suddenly dawned on me. It was all in my head. It was nothing to do with the world that I perceived around me. It was made up. Fabricated. A lie that I had believed and leaned on for so long to give me a sense of purpose and belonging, to feel as if I was important enough to have problems. And that problem-maker, that worrier, never came back. It was as if he disappeared. I don’t think he even existed in the first place. It was like a dream. Could I say my dream was real? Not really, but it seemed so real at the time.

And now that I’m not trying so hard to keep up my drama, it seems the world is no longer out to get me.