Constant Craving

By Jessica Lake

Understanding Everything

Throughout my lifetime, curiosity has defined me. I took joy in resolving anomalies. As a pup, my aim was true.

As an old dog, I have had to admit my finitude. Life is like that.

I don’t know everything.

Just everything important.

I would say I have gotten pretty damn close.

Autobiography

Those with autobiographical memory revisit their prior selves. They relive defining moments from their younger years: a childhood triumph, a painful teen breakup, a tryst with a friend’s husband. To varying degrees, the embodiment remains within their grasp.

I lack that.

My experiences sublimate, leaving the residue of knowledge.

A life viewed through the wrong end of a telescope.

Life passed through a lossy compressor.

Suppose a lover and I spend a perfect summer in Southampton.

Years later, my partner might cherish the taste, touch, and caress of a certain summer sunset. Perhaps that tenderness grows with each passing year.

I wept for days when my therapist opened my eyes to the inconceivable.

I had simply thought I had a lousy memory.

What survives my lossy compression?

Certainly not that sunset—

Nor that summer.

Rather, the run-through of a love affair.

It would take a Poet Laureate to find consolation in that void.

All I can offer is the ship’s manifest.

Contradiction

When a species of contradiction appears, I am compelled to resolve it.

Indeed, a vexation.

It may last for months, years, or decades.

It exists as an interior gnawing.

It is Sisyphean.

When one vexation surrenders, I winnow the debris for its successor.

For years, I accepted this with a smile.

In retrospect, I have spent my life building coherence from what survives lived experience.

Why?

Otherwise, it is lost—

And I am lost.

People often tell me to stop overthinking.

How can I?

Timeless

My compulsion to understand serves as an alternative to neurotypical episodic memory—that umbilical cord connecting past to present.

Without semantic compression, my experiences sublimate.

Without coherence, they scatter to the winds.

Does this explain why I crave solidity?

Why contradictions vex me?

Why I pursued certain questions for forty years?

Why do I keep rediscovering old essays and finding ideas I had forgotten writing?

For someone with autobiographical memory, understanding is useful.

For me, understanding is existential.

How else can I measure the inching of time?

The dollop of toothpaste each dawn and dusk.

Another tube gone.

Life Narrative

This explains why these recent discoveries have disturbed my sang-froid.

There is something ironic—

And cruel—

About being “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”

I thought myself lonely.

I thought myself in love.

I thought I had memories.

I thought I knew who I was.

Now those old declarations are deprecated. And because life compressed is what survives, replacing those declarations feels like rewriting history itself.

Not because the touchstones have altered.

Because I was so wrong about the motive and intent of the living between them.

The strangest realization is this:

Perhaps neurotypical people recognize themselves through the contour of their life’s narrative.

I recognize myself by strolling alphabetically through the encyclopedia of my life. I try to impose ordinality. I make my best guess at what transpired in betwixt.

Hold Tight

“I won the Tour de France.”

Memory boasts, “I sweat blood for that! That is mine!”

Knowledge shrugs, “Look. I won something.”

There is no “I” in “Knowledge.”

With that in mind, how tightly could my grasp be on “That is mine”?

And what of pride, confidence, ambition, goals, wants, and desires?

Knowledge can retain the fact: I like pizza.

But what gives that fact the force of: I want pizza?

And when someone else says, “I want Chinese,” what makes my want mine enough to hold against theirs?

I cannot answer that cleanly. My own history provides another explanation for why I so readily surrender my desires.

Still, the question remains:

If knowledge holds my accomplishments with a light grasp, how tightly does it hold my wants?

Oneiric

Sadly, without the oneiric, it could be anyone’s life.

And if that is true, then my understanding is not merely something I do.

It is how I remain attached to my own life.