Crying in Luke’s Lobster

Bryan Woods on letting it all out a little bit at a time.

What my therapist and I have been talking about lately, when I meet her in person once a month in her office on 40th Street and Madison, instead of our normal weekly sessions over Zoom, is my memory. How bad it is, how it causes me to make dumb mistakes like leaving wet laundry in the washing machine overnight, or perpetually losing my wallet, or forgetting to take the chicken out from the freezer in time to thaw for dinner. She thinks I need to be kinder to myself; I think she’s wrong. Everyone loses their wallet, so what? But I suspect that if I am kinder to myself about small things, I’ll be more lax with myself about larger things, and if I’m more lax about the Big Things, everything will fall apart.

But everything will fall apart. The path between life and death is not a straight line, but a circle, like hands on a clock that can only turn in one direction. The longer it’s been since someone close to you has died the closer you are to someone close to you dying. Having recently experienced death does not delay the next. Time is personal. If death feels foreign or unfamiliar to you right now, it is coming.

I haven’t been dwelling on death much lately. I was excited when “intrusive thoughts'' became a TikTok meme because it reminded me that I do often think of death, but subconsciously. Intrusively. I think of death each time I walk past the canvas apron that hangs from a cupboard knob in our kitchen, curled and hunched like a silhouette of the gallows, and of their aftermath. My wife gave it to me for Christmas. I think: I wonder if the apron ties could hold me, lol. Or when I’m failing to properly dice an onion, while watching the Gordon Ramsay video How To Dice An Onion on YouTube for the hundredth time, trying to cut as close to my three fingers as possible. I’m listening to XO by Elliott Smith while I’m chopping, and I’m fixating on the knife’s dull blade, and I’m clutching the handle in my palm while thinking about Elliott Smith and how things turned out for him.

I don’t tell my therapist about any of this, not because I’m keeping it from her, but because I don’t remember. And when I don’t remember something it disappears. Except nothing really disappears. The other day I found myself watching a YouTube video, and it occurred to me that I had seen it before, fifteen years ago. I suddenly remembered sitting in front of my black Dell computer in my cold apartment in Buffalo, watching the video on this new site called YouTube, and the image of me watching it was in third person. Have you ever mistakenly clicked onto a porn video you’ve already seen and felt disgusted? Why is that? Why does it need to be fresh? And does the reason I’m incapable of remembering to put my credit card back into my wallet after paying the bill at a restaurant have anything to do with the fact that my brain is apparently storing hundreds upon hundreds of gigabytes of things I’ve already watched online?

ICYMI

AUTUMN SWEATER