You have instructions written down. You don’t need them, but you check them anyway. Somehow they’re different from what you remember. Have they changed since you tucked the paper in your pocket?
You realize that you’ve lost your train of thought. You can’t remember what you were thinking before. There is only your present thought, now a loop of panic at your lost memory.
You stop in the middle of a room. Why are you here? Which room did you come from? You leave the room and remember what you were going to do. You walk back into the room. Why are you here?
You bring up an inside joke with a friend. They look at you blankly. They do not remember this joke. But you were there when I made it, you argue. They were not. They are not the friend you are thinking of. You realize it was your other friend, from work instead of high school, with blond hair instead of brown, tall instead of short. You do not know how these two friends are so similar in your mind.
You refer to every experience as happening “the other day.” Was it three years ago or yesterday? You try to remember context clues. Time is not real.
Someone asks you for an important piece of information. You have not thought about it since you saved it on your computer, labelled very clearly. You search through your files. It is not there. You find it days later by accident, labelled with a cryptic set of codes. You don’t know why you would label it this way. No one else uses this computer but you.
You are running late. You are always running late.
You have lost something. You check everywhere. You check everywhere again. Someone tells you to think of when you last had it. You don’t tell them that is the problem.
You reach the end of the page. You can’t remember what you just read.