sometimes you just hit a wall you know that feeling like you've been running at full tilt and suddenly the air just gets THICK and you can't breathe or move anymore i mean literally sometimes you can't move anymore lol. small joke. but yeah no. it’s like. you’re supposed to be in your early thirties, hitting your stride, killing it at the firm, maybe even starting to think about kids or like, a dog or something. and instead you're just… labeling photo albums this started a few weeks ago, after that last appointment. the one where dr k used words like "progressive" and "degenerative" and you just nod and smile and pretend you're absorbing it all but really you're just mentally calculating how many years you have left before the tremor becomes, like, *actually* incapacitating. it's a fun game. five years? ten? you never know! so yeah, the photo albums. my mom, bless her heart, is a digital hoarder but also a physical hoarder. like every family event since i was born has its own dedicated physical album, all those glossy 4x6s that are slightly sticky. and they’re just… not labeled. like at all. it’s just a sea of smiling faces, holidays, birthdays, christmases, vacations, all jumbled together and i just had this thought, this really clear, cold thought: someone’s gotta do this. someone’s gotta put the names and the dates and the places on these things before… well, you know. before i can't. before i can’t remember the names or the dates or the places. or hold a pen. or whatever comes next in this delightful little neuro-chronology so now i’m here. night after night. surrounded by these binders of forgotten moments. and it’s not even just my family. it’s like, my great aunts and uncles. people i haven’t seen in twenty years. and i’m like, staring at a picture of my grandpa with a really bad perm from 1982 trying to remember if that was the year he bought the camaro or sold the boat. and i’m writing it all down. very neatly. with these little archival pens. bc you know, gotta be PRECISE. gotta make sure future me, or future whoever, gets all the details right and the thing is, i don’t feel sad. or scared. which is the weirdest part. you’d think this would be, like, an existential crisis-level activity, right? but i just feel… numb. like i’m doing a really tedious, incredibly important administrative task. like a very grim personal archivist. cataloging the entire past before it all… gets deleted from the server, permanently. lol. again with the jokes. it's just this weird dissociation. like i’m watching myself do this. watching this young architect, who’s supposed to be drafting blueprints for skyscrapers, sitting here with a magnifying glass and a box of old polaroids, trying to differentiate between christmas 1993 and christmas 1994. and like, how do you even feel about that? is this grief? anticipatory grief? or am i just… a really detail-oriented person? a bit of a control freak even in the face of my own encroaching neurological decline? you know how they talk about finding meaning, finding purpose, blah blah blah? well, my purpose right now seems to be ensuring the accurate historical record of my family’s slightly blurry, poorly lit memories. it feels… not profound. it feels like homework. but like, homework that actually matters for once. unlike that stats final i have next week. that definitely does not feel like it matters. at all. and then sometimes i just stop, mid-label. and look at a picture of me, like, five years old, holding a melting ice cream cone at disneyland. and i know exactly what i was thinking in that moment: "don’t drop it, don’t drop it." and now it’s like, "don’t forget it, don’t forget it." and it’s just… a lot. but still, no tears. just this dull ache behind my eyes. and the faint smell of old paper and dust. and the knowledge that there are still like, fifteen more albums to go. and then it’s 2am and i’m typing this out on my phone bc who else do you even tell this to? "hey, i’m busy micro-managing my own future memory loss by organizing decades of amateur photography." it just sounds so… extra. but it's not. it’s just what you do. when you know what’s coming. you just… prepare. meticulously. for the inevitable erasure.