Aphae’s Aphorisms

It’s not talked about enough how extreme anxiety and depression can cause significant memory loss—not the kind where you don’t remember what you did when you were one, but the kind where you don’t remember anything from just a year or two ago. It feels as though someone wiped your memory clean. You’re left with vague fragments, maybe a few major events, and even those feel uncertain—like you’re not sure if they truly happened or if your mind made them up. It’s terrifying to not remember who you used to be, to feel disconnected from your own timeline. There’s a strange kind of grief in forgetting yourself, in mourning someone you can’t fully recall, and it quietly seeps into every part of your healing.

Oh, to be loved by a writer only sounds nice when you're not the one on the receiving end. Do you know how many sleepless nights it takes to engrave the memory of someone you love on paper, to attempt to describe the way their laugh made you sigh in contentment, as if for the first time your heart was in safe hands? The tear-soaked pages curled into balls and were thrown in the dustbin because writing about them physically hurt, yet there was no other way to let the pain out. You'd fill every space in your diary with descriptions of the hearts they carried in their eyes, the stardust in their hair, or how their freckles were kisses from the divine. The urge to absolutely lose yourself in their memories and be high on the way eyes would only look for you in a room full of people, or get drunk on the sound of their voice, how it would only soften for you, or the way their body perfectly molded into yours, as if it could never know any other home than your arms.

“A poem…begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”