So, a story:

      Back in high school, I had a flip phone. Now, I wasn’t a teenager of notable wealth, so it wasn’t a particularly fancy phone, just a cheap Samsung with two colour LCDs. (something notable from the time, I guess?) You could get a blurry camera feed on the little front screen which would usually only show the time, allowing you to snap a photo with the phone closed, presumably making it a proto selfie camera of sorts. I enjoyed the functionality this notable little screen allowed for a total of maybe two pictures, before promptly breaking it by falling down a flight of stairs in Heart Lake with the phone in my pocket.

      While my overabundance of natural grace may have robbed me of the opportunity to join the selfie pioneers in their glamorous lite-narcissism, I found myself preoccupied with a much more mundane and ubiquitous feature: the memo pad. My semi-broken Samsung flip gave way to nearly a decade of habitual note-taking, spanning phones, leather-bound journals, small pocket notebooks (that would have a dedicated everyday pocket in my everyday jeans), more leather-bound journals, and a faux leather-bound graphic-novel/typographical-trauma-mitigation-rant-odyssey.

      These entries (scribbles, essays, fragmented overflowings of my psyche) were inconsistent in coherence: a paragraph about my disdain for pop music, a shopping list with ‘realize my soul’ written between ‘eggs’ and ‘vinegar’, the word ‘WHY’ written in large letters in the middle of the page over itself over and over again until the pen ripped the paper, etc. My memos from over the years had spawned from innumerable inspirations and could have served any number of purposes depending on the time of writing, but the one specific function most pertinent to this recollection would be my occasional urge to keep a dream journal.

      As I’m sure you are aware, dreams are funny, fickle things. Some dream of past events, others of wondrous flights of fancy. Some dream of things close to their hearts, others dream cinematic stories of characters and worlds previously unknown even to fiction. Some even dream lucidly and take a run at being gods (Inception ruined this for a lot of people). I used to cinematic dream nearly every night before the insomnia, and of the many worlds and scenarios I visited, only a handful ever invoked the urge to take pen to paper: four or so world concepts, a handful of plot ideas, and one girl.

      It was sometime around the end of highschool that I dreamt of her. It was nothing fantastical, nothing raunchy. All I remember about the girl, however vaguely, is that we were friends. I remember blue. Maybe she dyed her hair blue, maybe she was wearing a blue jacket, maybe we walked by a blue house once. She had a name, I might have even repeated whatever I thought it was to a friend, but even that guess is long lost to time. You may wonder, based on my shaky recollection of this character, if I had bothered to take dream journal notes at all, and truthfully I must admit that I committed a cardinal dream-chronicler sin: I waited.

      In dreams, I have probably come into contact with a plethora of different characters, be they projections of the subconscious, memories of real people, caricatures of important figures, but never before this, and not since, have I ever encountered a dream that begged so desperately not to end. My only memory of the dream is feeling like I was beginning to wake up, and her screaming “Don’t forget me!” as the dream ended.

      I woke up, beating my alarm by 5 or so minutes, and it felt as if those words had been burnt into my soul. I went to school, I laughed with friends, I mangled the French language, and yet the entire day those words hung heavy on my chest. I spent the day trying to remember, trying to play any part of it back in my head with no success until the day had given way to evening and the inexplicable guilt of forgetting who I was supposed to remember prompted me to whip out my phone and type “DON’T FORGET HER” into the memo pad.

      In the end, my reminder to not forget ultimately served as a reminder that I had already forgotten something of importance. My regret the next day was replaced by resolve, a promise that, though I had already broken the previous one, I would write her into a story as consolation. As an apology to this figment of my imagination that I had been unable to keep alive even for a moment, I vowed that i would eventually immortalize her in fiction, and so give literary shape to her absence and to the profound feeling of loss it had stirred in me.

      “DON’T FORGET HER” was about 9 years ago. In the time since, I never encountered anything that rekindled any noticeable memory of her, and the more I thought about what I believed I knew, the more uncertain I became regarding its truth. The world has changed noticeably in 9 years, and somewhere along the way I supposed I must have changed alongside it. I used to say that I had plans, and that at the end of the day, everything I’d do would be ultimately subservient to my ambitions. My tech background would pay the bills, while my free time would be spent on writing worlds for my readers to escape to, playing music and creating art from my soul that hopefully can stir something up in someone else’s.

      But here I am: a semi-fresh degree that I sacrificed chunks of myself to attain, a long, slow, 10+ year debt to the governmental powers that be, a job that not only wastes the talent people once praised me for, but also wastes the “lucrative” education I had painstakingly retrained myself for, having never written so much as a line of code before university. To top it all off, Literal years have passed since I’ve written so much as a paragraph of fiction.

      I saw a movie today. It was a lovely film in which a boy tries to remember the name of the girl from his dreams. I left that movie curious, but not due to any open ended questions left by the movie’s ending, but my own. Namely, when did I end? When did I die inside enough to continually procrastinate on the things that were once important to me? When did I start hating myself enough to become the villain in my own internal narrative? When did I start believing that it would be impossible for me to find love because of the way I look? What or who swept in and replaced all of my motivation with apathy and resigned procrastination, and why didn’t I put up a fight when they did?

      I left the theater today wanting to know how many more years I was going to waste doing nothing to stop being unhappy, and that the best answers to these questions would be discovered not by answering the whys and the whens, but to stop playing a miserable, hapless protagonist in my own self-propagating, self-sustaining misery narrative, and to do what any proper protagonist would do and start giving a damn again about changing my world, broadening my horizons, summoning the courage again to be passionate about the things I love and put in at least some effort to try and realize them. I have unfinished business, unfulfilled promises to a mystery girl and to myself to get my shit in order.

I’m not going to say things like “I’m back” or “I’m a changed man”, but one thing I will most certainly commit to is that I’m going to start giving a shit again.

And you can bet your ass I’m going to start writing again.

(TL;DR: Your Name was a pretty ok movie, let’s grab a beer)