I forgot who I was once, a long time ago. Beside an interstate, maybe I70 and I think in Nebraska but I don’t remember. I don’t know if I knew at the time. Somewhere along the way I’d wandered off the highway looking for food. Starved and/or stoned for weeks I shambled back out still hungry and hitched a couple rides 300 miles in the wrong direction. The last truck dropped me off at an off-ramp and I sat crushed and very, very alone on the guardrail listening to the big rigs downshifting as they slowed down to turn off to who knows where.

Nobody.

I was nobody in who knows where. Couldn’t recall my name. Didn’t remember where I was going or why. Fact is there was no place to go that I had any reason to be except that it wasn’t where I was coming from. Even that. Couldn’t figure out where I had come from or why I left.

So no name.

No history.

No destination beyond eventually returning to the dirt which at the moment seemed sooner than later, and for the first and maybe the last time in my life the very idea of sooner scared the shit out of me.

There was a small stand of trees a ways off that seemed a good place to sort things out, or just sit and die in private. Die or cry. I made my way out there and sat down with my bag of grief. It felt like grief, but lost and grief feel the same. So I sat down the the dirt behind the trees and thought about how the world seemed very big and very small at the same time. Big because I was a million miles from nowhere. Small because my ability to escape where I was, well I might as well have been locked in the closet.

I thought about how I didn’t remember my name and got to thinking maybe I wasn’t there at all. That maybe I was somebody else’s memory.

Vapor.

Except my ass hurt from sitting on the hard ground reminded me that there must be some weight to me if gravity had me pressed hard against the rocks.

So maybe I slept a bit or maybe I didn’t but when I opened my eyes I remembered my name. For better or worse I was this miserable prick that wandered out onto a highway somewhere back east, and lo and behold, I was headed for the Bay Area with no real reason except it wasn’t where I was coming from. I thought maybe I’d go somewhere and reinvent myself and be cool and popular and good looking and necessary and loved and wanted and all the good stuff.

Remembering all that didn’t exactly feel good.

Shit.

This couldn’t be what people meant when they said to take off and go find myself. Remembering who I was was scarier than not remembering. Really the only reason I walked back out to the road was hunger. Tell you what though, losing my shit and finding it again was a learning experience. I remember being so bound up with anxiety and fear feeling that I was about to lose it, my whole life, and then when it happened it wasn’t any scarier than… well, I’d been through worse, so.

And I got to thinking over the next few days, what if I never remembered? Wouldn’t that be the ultimate freedom? Utter independence from history, a man could get an entirely new start, right? Everyone who tries to make a new version of themself is anchored in their own history. Like Gatsby in a way. So what I learned is that I can change behavior, and change attitude, and change outcomes for the person i was born as, but…

Anyway, things didn’t get better right away but being so close to gone for good lessened the fear of it all.

No matter how bad shit ever got after that I knew deep down it would pass, even if it felt like it wouldn’t. So in that sense the person that I remembered I am, was better off than the person I had forgotten I was. Funny how that worked out. I was more… free? Yah, I was free. It just took a while to figure out what to do with being free.