Read an Excerpt
THE STUDY OF OBLIVION
seven weeks since breakdown
How long is this thing?
It’s two hours.
Is it always going to be this long?
No, this is just a consultation to see if it makes sense for us to work together.
Work together? Like collaborate?
Like if it makes sense for me to take you on as a client.
Ohhh, so this is like a pitch.
My new therapist looks at me and blinks twice. I explain further:
Like you’re an agent deciding if you want my manuscript and maybe by the end of this, you’ll sign me.
She smiles, but by the way her mouth shifts, it almost looks like she’s just eaten something sour. She says, where would you like to start?
With oblivion. Obviously.
My new therapist says, what’s oblivion? She says this nonchalantly as if oblivion was a dog I had during my childhood who I should not still be mourning at the age of twenty-seven.
I say, well, let’s begin with its etymology.
Oblivion. Noun. Fourteenth century.
State of forgetting, forgetfulness, loss of memory.
Directly from Latin. Oblivionem. Forgetfulness; a being forgotten.
A being. Forgotten.
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary:
Oblivion is supposed to have originally stemmed from the breakdown of ob- and lēvis. Together meaning: to even out, smooth over. However, linguists (“de Vaan and others”) say:
a semantic shift from to be smooth to to forget is not very convincing.
This quote is followed up with:
However no better explanation has emerged.
Also from the Online Etymology Dictionary:
For sense of oblivion’s evolution, compare oblivious and obliterate.
I never understood the relationship linguistics is trying to draw between these words, so let’s continue:
I began calling it oblivion when I was twenty-four. Three years ago, and long after it began. Of course, the word had already been famously used in John Green’s novel The Fault in Our Stars, but I didn’t get the word from there. In fact, when I learned that oblivion had been used in that book, I almost changed the name. But then I didn’t, because I’d been calling it oblivion for so long, and I’m lazy.
She doesn’t laugh.
Anyways,
Oblivion began when I was much younger. Four is my earliest memory of it. And it is the second memory I have of my entire life.
My first memory is me at two and a half. Looking at my father and saying:
I. Two a half.
I don’t remember why I started calling it by the name oblivion three years ago, but that’s the only word that came to mind. And I needed something to refer to it as instead of just that thing that happens to me, so I settled on oblivion. And so far:
No better explanation has emerged.
That said, my new therapist seems to have one and will tell me in approximately forty minutes.
I think I was writing at my desk when the word came to me, but I can’t really remember. Oblivion tends to mess with my memory. It messes with a lot of things.
Like my life.
You see, oblivion didn’t creep in, like most things do. It didn’t slide under the weathering foundation of my life, dripping, accumulating, like a slow leak. There are mixed metaphors of water and gas here, but it wasn’t, isn’t, and won’t ever be an element nor a property. In a similar respect, it can’t be found on the periodic table or located in a lab. However, it can be, with language, pointed to, like a person with no eyes trying to point at a flying, silent, bird. In this way, it also cannot be pointed to, but still I can try. This is one of my many attempts:
A tarot reader once walked with me along Henry Hudson Parkway. She told me that animals, after they are traumatized, or chased to be hunted down, or if a dog does something “embarrassing” (these are all forms of trauma according to her), shake their bodies viciously for a moment as if trying to shed themselves of the memory. Or, she also offered, as if they are moving the trauma through their animal bodies so it doesn’t create blockages in consciousness.
Another man who was not a friend but someone who wanted to have sex with me (though he explained it as wanting to hold me) once said he believed consciousness lived not in the brain but in our fascia.
That’s the first time I heard the word.
The word fascia. Not oblivion.
what is fascia? About 90,000,000 results (0.65 seconds)
Fascia is a thin casing of connective tissue that surrounds and holds every organ, blood vessel, bone, nerve fiber and muscle in place. Fascia has nerves that make it almost as sensitive as skin.
Johns Hopkins says related searches are hypnosis, Chinese medicine, and imagery (whatever that means).
Fascia, like the brain, confuses scientists and doctors, so they often don’t talk about it.
My second memory is of the world emptying. I was in my parents’ bedroom when it happened. I’m not sure where they were, but I know I was walking to the bathroom. I blinked my eyes and then they stayed shut. And in that moment when my eyelids wouldn’t open, I saw my family home. My parents, in the middle of whatever they were doing—washing dishes, fixing a light bulb, fighting in the kitchen—suddenly vanished. Where they were, a haze for a moment, a poof, and then just and only the background. The room, empty. Then I was in my sister’s room and she vanished too. Then the vision zoomed out to my town, and everyone there was suddenly gone. Then it zoomed out again, like a camera lens. All the humans in the country, vanished. Zoom out again. Then all the humans in all the continents, gone. All the homes once so violently lived in were empty. Only place and nature left. I was still unable to open my eyes from the blink when the homes disappeared too. Then every structure on earth, small or large, gone too. Then the animals.
Then the vision zoomed out for a fourth time, and I saw the entirety of the spherical earth with obsidian space in the background. From there, I watched as the grass and trees disappeared; the water, dried. The once green-and-blue earth, which I had only ever seen in photos, was gray and desolate. The earth became a bald mass. Not desolated by existence but just that every trace of life disappeared from the planet as if it never existed in the first place. All color drained. All life, void. Then the blackness came. The sun I knew, disappeared too, burning itself once and for all. In the utter blackness of space, time ceased to exist; there was nothing to keep time. There was no sun. Then the vision zoomed out again, and I saw our whole solar system. There, every planet, not just earth, was devoid of any life. Though still spinning. Spinning because that’s all there was left to do. Then the vision zoomed out one final time, and I saw a chunk of the universe with its hundreds of galaxies, and in each of those hundreds of galaxies, only empty planets spinning and spinning and spinning.
Oblivion confuses me, so I have to talk about it.
Unlike scientists or doctors, I have nothing to prove.
Oblivion has gotten much worse recently.
Which is why I began to see this new therapist. I mean you.
When I say much worse, I mean I used to ebb in and out of oblivion. Now I’m just stuck here. And I can’t stop crying.
When my eyes finally opened, which they did only a second after they closed (it all happened so fast and yet simultaneously infinitely), I came down from space and found myself back in my parents’ room. I continued my walk to the bathroom. I had to pee. As I sat on the toilet, I couldn’t get the vision out of my mind. And unlike an animal, I didn’t shake the memory off; I didn’t know I needed to. Instead, I sat on the cold porcelain, unable to feel the chill on my bottom, and I thought about the spinning planets.
If my family didn’t have money, I surely would be in a state institution right now. If my family didn’t have money, I also wouldn’t have been able to take time off from my part-time job after oblivion took over. I also, for the past four years, wouldn’t have been able to only have a part-time job at a nonprofit, which provides me with enough income to pay a ninth of my rent while I pursue my dream of becoming a writer, if my family did not have money. In summary, if my family did not have money, I would not be able to pursue any type of dream or have the luxury of a jobless mental breakdown, because this is the type of world we live in. Sidenote: my parents are immigrants who still believe in the American Dream.
My girlfriend doesn’t like oblivion very much. From the look on her face right now, neither does my new therapist. However, my old therapist liked it very much. Sometimes I think he even loved me for it.
My new therapist says, does your relationship with your old therapist remind you of a relationship from your past?
When I say love, I mean sometimes my old therapist looked at me like he wanted to take my clothes off. Which means sometimes he looked at me like that guy who told me about fascia. Which means sometimes he looked at me like every other guy I’ve ever met. Every. Other. Guy.
My old therapist also told me oblivion was my connection to the divine. Which means, according to my new therapist, my old therapist could have made oblivion much worse.
I tell my new therapist, maybe the relationship was reminiscent of something, but I can’t remember. I am forgetful. Remember?
For years, I thought of my second memory. And in this way my second memory became my third and fourth and seventh and hundredth and thousandth memory. I still hadn’t shaken it off. Why? Because I was not an animal. But really why? Well, because when the last lonely human sacrificed herself to the elements, when the last flower had wilted into dried soil, when the last animal still fought against death, limbs kicking into the air, despite knowing there was nothing to live for (of course, I didn’t see all of this, in my mind they just poofed, this is me hyperbolizing because that’s what people do), the planets still turned. I watched them spin for nothingness. And while the empty planets spun, the galaxies did not mourn the lives lost on their children of mass. They did not cry. They did not feel sadness. The universe still existed despite life, within it, not. Still, you may be wondering why this bothered me so much.
You see, when every person, place, thing, even light, even time, disappeared in front of my closed eyes, I saw the emptying of existence, life completely disappearing, except one thing remained. I was still there. I didn’t join the rest of life in the act of vanishing, the consolation of not existing together, and through that togetherness, the joint venture of it all, somehow, somewhere, existing. Despite trying, I couldn’t make myself disappear like the rest of you. I was trapped there alone, watching the bald planets in every lonely galaxy spin for nothingness.
My new therapist repeats: so where would you like to start?
I need to finish my manuscript.
how to finish a manuscript: About 23,100,000 results (0.71 seconds)
NY Book Editors: Finish Your Manuscript! 8 Productivity Hacks for Writers
1. Just Start Writing. Don’t let something as silly as writer’s block stop you from actually writing.
2. Write a Lot. I mean, a lot.
3. Give Yourself a Deadline.
My new therapist says, can you say more?
So I say, well I had a mental breakdown and now I’m stuck in oblivion, which wouldn’t be so much of a problem if I could still write, but I haven’t been able to because oblivion just keeps deepening and there’s this pain in my chest too, which isn’t what oblivion usually is, so I came to you, I begin to finish my point, because I need to finish my manuscript and my girlfriend found your studies online. She said you’ve done studies on people who think the world is unreal. And she said that sounds like me, because when oblivion takes over, I say, nothing is real. Like literally nothing except me and I created this whole world and I’m stuck in it.
My new therapist doesn’t say anything, so I continue:
So yeah, I’m stuck in oblivion, kind of like a character is stuck in a book but the character also wrote the book but now they can’t escape from the book.
My new therapist doesn’t move. She’s frozen.
And that’s all fine, but an agent is waiting to look at my manuscript and I can’t finish the last story in my manuscript, which is a story about my girlfriend. And I can’t finish it, because I don’t know how our story ends.
Are you writing a memoir?
No. I write fiction.
I pause and realize how quickly I’m talking, but I can’t stop talking because it’s the only thing that pacifies the pain in my chest. I continue: But if you’re asking about genre, which I think you are, I don’t know what genre my book is because I haven’t finished it yet. It may be a psychodrama. Or a horror story. Or a disillusionment plot (a change in worldview from positive to negative). Or an educato plot (change in worldview from negative to positive). Or a war story. Or a woman’s story. Or a mockumentary. Or maybe science fiction.
I wasn’t asking about genre, but it seems like you’re concerned about the genre?
This should be a statement, but she says it like a question, which makes me want to itch my neck.
My new therapist continues speaking very slowly: if it is fiction, then why are you writing a story about your girlfriend?
Oblivion clouds the room in a haze and I wonder why I made this lady and her tan couch and her awful textile pillows. But mostly, I wonder why I created her to be wearing ballet flats. And why, if I created her, I’m so scared of her. And why, if I created this whole world, it seems so terrifying. Then I remember I’m trapped within it, and I don’t know a way out. And even if I did know a way out, I’d be alone on the other side anyways. I think all of this but I say:
So think of yourself like my writing professor.
