Thoughts on Reminder
I’m a box ticker, a to-do crosser. I find meaning in it. Even if so much of it is, big picture, meaningless.
Note: This is an essay on my short story Reminder — read it first!
As I sit down to write this essay, I’ve mostly completed my nightly pre-bed routine, which includes doing any dishes (so there won’t be any for me to do the next morning), fluffing the pillows (so the couch will be fluffy for me whenever I want to sit down again), setting the microwave light to Night Mode (so there will be some light, but not too much, when I get up to pee in the middle of the night), and checking the front door lock (which I will still check again if I walk by it between now and tomorrow morning). I spend a good chunk of my day setting future me up for success; thanks to present me, future me usually has what he needs, is safe and comfortable.
A few months ago, while walking by a visual reminder I had left for myself (ironically, I can’t quite recall what it was — probably some bills left in an odd but visible place so I’d remember to pay them) I thought of this phenomenon in comical terms. If I suffered amnesia, I thought, I’d be like the characters in Memento or Blindspot, except instead of cool tattoos telling me what to do, I’d have a bevy of cellphone notifications and oddly-placed household objects. Then it occurred to me that those characters use their tattoos to recover their identities; my reminders would only allow me to be cared for, but wouldn’t necessarily say anything about who I am (besides, that is, a neurotic) or help me recover my memory.
Looked at from that lens, the time I spend setting future me up for success feels a little depressing; its significance is shallow and unrevealing. Why don’t I dedicate that time instead to, I don’t know, growing as a person? Meditating? Praying? Doing works of charity? It’s not like I don’t do those things (I do, minus the meditating) but definitely not as much, and not with as much zeal, as my tasks. I’m a box ticker, a to-do crosser. I find meaning in it. Even if so much of it is, big picture, meaningless.
Actually, I’ll recant: I don’t find meaning in it. I feel distracted. And what I want to be distracted from is how meaningless my life feels most of the time.
* * *
If you’re a connoisseur of American cinema, you might’ve thought of the 2004 classic film 13 Going On 30 as you read my story. If you haven’t seen it (and I’m glad you’re not telling this to my face, as that might upset me very much — and no, it’s not “the same as Big”), 13 Going On 30 is about a young 13 year-old girl, Jena Rink, who like most of us at any age, hates herself — except she feels the self-hate with more intensity because she is a teenager, and she lives in New Jersey. Eventually it all gets to be too much, and she locks herself up in a basement closet while chanting a mantra that she read in her favorite magazine, Poise: “30, and flirty, and thriving.” What do you know, the next morning she wakes up and she’s 30!
At that point, she goes through a similar journey as the man in Reminder, navigating an apartment that seems to belong to her but which she does not recognize. A crucial difference, of course, is that the man doesn’t know who he is, while Jena does — she’s just confused about her age and location. Eventually she pieces it all together: she lives in Manhattan, works at Poise, and the most popular girl in her school is now her best friend! She happily proclaims she’s gotten everything she’s ever wanted — until it becomes clear that in order to get all of that, she’s had to become a horrible person, who cheats and lies and doesn’t really love (or is loved by) anyone.
Watching the movie now that I’m in my 30s (something I highly recommend — I take it back, I do spend time on things that make me grow as a person!), I realize the “lesson” of it has changed for me. When I was a kid, what I took from it was “don’t grow up, growing up is gross,” which remains true, but I can’t help because it has already happened. So now, what I take from it is a great metaphor for moments when you take stock of your life and realize that a good chunk has already gone by and you’re not necessarily where you thought you’d be, or more importantly, who you thought you’d be.
In many ways I can say, like Jena, that I got everything I’ve ever wanted; as a kid my biggest dreams were being a writer and traveling the world. Voilá, here I am thousands of miles from where I was born, writing. If kid me saw me in my Brooklyn apartment typing away with a view of the Statue of Liberty from my window (if I crane my neck and squint), he would die of excitement. But, while I haven’t stabbed anyone in the back (or at least as many people as Jena has) to get to where I am, the movie deeply resonates with me, especially the scene where it all crashes down and she goes back to her parents’ house to be coddled as Billy Joel’s “Vienna” plays. I always tear up during it, especially because her parents, whom she has treated very poorly in the past, welcome her back warmly and with no questions, as if they also understood the inherent pain that is growing up.
My worst fear, back when I had a stable job that paid me well, was that in the blink of an eye I’d wake up and be 50 and trapped inside the comforts of a comprehensive benefits package with a life that in no way resembled what I had dreamed for myself (a sort of horror version of 13 Going on 30). So I imploded the whole thing and moved here, to pursue said dreams — and yet when I take stock, there still are aspects of my life that cue the melancholic chords of “Vienna.” Not living near my family is one of the things that weighs heaviest on me. Not having a family of my own is another. Pursuing a career that is in many ways frivolous. Not doing enough for others. The list goes on.
Before you put on the happy sunglasses and say “but Francisco, what about THESE things?” and I have to shush you like I shush my therapist when he tries that shit: I KNOW there are good things. I said it was the life of my dreams, didn’t I? I guess I was just not prepared for what it would feel like to be an adult. As the oft-repeated truism goes, I thought I’d have “everything figured out,” but for the most part I still feel like a kid, and have realized with dread that that’s how adults felt when I was a kid too, they just had a secret pact not to talk about it.
It’s maddening, to be put in charge of an adult life without feeling like an adult, so instead I plan and execute these little tasks, grocery trips and cleaning the house and organizing my calendar, and while I’m accomplishing them I think of the next ones and create reminders on my To-Do app so I won’t forget to do them. A friend of mine once said that brushing her teeth gave her existential dread because she could never do it so right that she didn’t have to do it again. But isn’t that the point of these tasks? (I mean, besides not getting cavities?) For box tickers like me, they give us the impression of forward motion, when in fact they are a hamster wheel, tiring us out so we don’t think about what upsets us.
* * *
After the idea of the story (a man wakes up with no recollection of his identity and is guided through his day by reminders) began to take shape, I wondered whether the reason for the man’s memory loss would be revealed, or at least hinted at, and whether he’d regain his identity. I had a couple of ideas as to why it would have happened, particularly one involving the discovery of some truth that rocked the man’s worldview to such an extent that he lost himself. (My revisor had another intriguing idea: that he had ghosted someone on the internet and therefore become a sort of ghost himself. All that’s left of that concept is the fleeting sexting in the second half of the story).
Ultimately, I found myself thoroughly uninterested by that angle. Of course, some of it still drives the story, with references to the man attending a party the day prior that seemed to get pretty wild, but the reason for the memory loss, as well as the man’s “prior” identity, seemed inconsequential. I realized as I was writing it that, in my mind, there is no “prior” (hence the quotations) identity: this man hasn’t known who he is for quite a while. He just doesn’t remember suffering this problem because, well, that would mean remembering something personal, which his brain doesn’t do. He’s Drew Barrymore in 50 First Dates except there’s no starting point.
My personal interpretation is not a part of the story; if you have a different theory as to what happened to the man, it is as valid as mine, because it’s not in the text. But the way I see it, nothing happened at the party the previous night. The man went to it while suffering the same problem he’s suffering now. He attended the party because he was invited and didn’t know if Sam was his friend and it’d be rude to skip it; he went home early because his phone told him his bedtime was approaching. He made the same decision he makes at the end of the next day: tomorrow he’ll deal with it. He’s been making the same decision for years.
Because isn’t that the point of the story? Not some high stakes intrigue regarding some event that caused him to lose his memory, and the secrets that will be unraveled once he recovers it. Instead, it’s about the scarier thought that if I suffered from that problem, if I couldn’t remember who I was and went through a day via the reminders I’ve set up, that day wouldn’t look terribly different from any other in my life. Tasks from morning to evening, Monday to Friday, with some rest on nights and weekends, during which I’m too tired from the tasks to work on making meaningful changes.
“That’s just how life goes,” you say. “99% is menial.” Okay, sure. I guess I’m coming from my personal journey, in which my life was uprooted when I was 12 by the move to a different country with a different language and culture, which disrupted my sense of normalcy and exacerbated my nomad tendencies. I am particularly prone to be bored with, and even upset by, routine, even if it’s the thing I throw myself at with gusto to silence the bigger impulses of change. I, like the man at the end of the story, often think “I’ll do something about it tomorrow,” but unlike him, the thought only generates anxiety.
Like I joked with my revisor once, the title of our autobiography will be “No one can say I didn’t worry about it.” Doing something about it, on the other hand...
* * *
One of the most fun parts to write was the staff meeting, which is very much based on the staff meetings at my job. We do the so-called “name games,” something imported from the gym that some employees attend, where people in communal classes have to introduce themselves and answer a prompt that reveals a bit of their personalities. Obviously at work we all know who the other people are (do we? Maybe there’s some Reminders in the staff who are good at pretending); we just do it to make a boring meeting more fun.
The reason I included it in the story is because of the ludicrousness at the core of the concept: that answering a silly prompt like “which Power Ranger would you be?” can reveal an innate quality you possess. I giggled out loud when I wrote that people in the staff agreed the man was “100% the green one,” not only because I’m so funny I amuse even myself, but because I’ve too been stupid and taken a Buzzfeed quiz that tells me which Game of Thrones character I am, becoming emotionally invested in the answer, hoping it will reveal something about myself. As if stuff like name games or Buzzfeed quizzes could do that. At most, it can reveal a general impression caused by me on others, which is a far cry from who I “am.”
In fact, the verb “to be,” in Spanish (as in other Latin languages) has two forms: ser and estar. Estar is a transitory quality of being, like when we are hungry or we are in love. Those are not intrinsic things to us, we are them until we are no longer them. Ser, however, speaks to something more permanent, like being tall or being an optimist. Some ser things could still change, I guess, but in general ser describes what we are as a person, our identity, the thing that name games and Buzzfeed quizzes are trying to determine. The thing that I, perhaps, should be working to determine during some of the time that I instead spend on tasks concerned mostly on my estar.
The dilemma at the end of the story, when the man struggles between seeking help for his issue or keeping quiet and not jeopardizing what he has, is fundamentally a choice between a ser well-being and an estar well-being. If he chooses to seek help, his estar will be impacted; he’ll probably be deemed unfit to take care of himself, may be committed to an in-patient facility, his job might be in jeopardy. On the other hand, if he keeps quiet, his ser will remain lost. He won’t recover his memory or make a new one, which will keep him isolated from everyone else; his loneliness throughout the day was the hardest part to write (more on that in a second).
It’s not easy, making the decisions to rock the boat: quitting your job, getting married, moving out. It’s always more appealing to make them tomorrow, especially since they might resolve by themselves by then. “Was it too optimistic to keep banking on his identity coming back organically?” the man asks himself, and yet that’s exactly what he banks on by going to bed. It even made me think of the pandemic, all the things that are “on pause,” the hard decisions that a lot of us have hesitated to make because things might “go back to normal.”
And it is true that a lot of the time, big changes are not the solution. Overhauling your entire life every time you hit a bump in the road seems like a bad strategy. Sometimes patience and endurance are called for. But sometimes, you don’t do anything and then you’re 50 and trapped inside the comforts of a comprehensive benefits package with a life that in no way resembles what you had dreamed for yourself, because you focused too much on the estar and not enough on the ser.
* * *
The only reminder the man can’t decipher is a “Love you” written on a whiteboard on his fridge. I used to have one of those on my fridge, and it was never used seriously — my roommate and I left each other silly messages, and often visitors would do the same. Maybe the person who wrote it in Reminder was also joking, or maybe they do love the man. He can’t tell.
As I said a couple of paragraphs ago, describing the man’s loneliness was the hardest part of writing this story; it’s not a concept I like to dwell much on in a year in which I haven’t been able to see my family, and in which my social interactions have been drastically reduced. The man does not know if there’s anyone who he can trust in his circle of friends, with whom he could open up about the memory problems that assail him. Ostensibly, this is because he doesn’t remember any of them and therefore does not know how intimate they are with him. But I would argue that even those of us who haven’t been hit with amnesia all of a sudden can still face similar questions: how much can we trust our loved ones to handle the truth about us, to be supportive and not judge us, to give us good advice, or (the bare minimum, but rarer and rarer) simply carve out some time to listen to us? How much can we trust, in other words, that our loved ones truly love us?
It’s often a trope in this sort of story that love is what breaks the spell. It’s Phil’s love for Rita that makes time move again in Groundhog Day. Mother and daughter finally seeing and appreciating the other’s point of view makes them return to their rightful bodies in Freaky Friday. 13 Going on 30 has Mark Ruffalo, that sturdiest of anchors, to remind Jena of whom she used to be and how far she has strayed. All the man in Reminder has is a “Love you” scribbled on his whiteboard, maybe earnestly, maybe in jest. Perhaps it’s not that love is the solution, but that lack of love is the problem — and the man does not have love. Not today, at least.
A while ago, while going to sleep, I turned off my bedroom light to realize there was a racoon on the fire escape right outside my window. The encounter went pretty much as described in the story, except I didn’t say “Love you” to the racoon (as I do, thankfully, have other people to say it to). But it stayed with me. The sympathy I felt for the animal was surprising, considering that if the window was open I’d be both afraid of it and aggressive towards it. There was a metaphor there, the safety of the window allowing me to contemplate it neutrally and even feel affection for it. Love was not the feeling: I didn’t feed it, or even help it down the stairs, as I wasn’t prepared to risk my comfort and safety for it. But in that moment we saw each other; clocking each other’s existence in a way that felt meaningful.
Arguably, that’s all the man in Reminder needs: to be seen. He has everything else: a house, a job, food, clothes, even friends (at least they call themselves that). But no one sees him, because no one really knows what he’s going through. That moment with the racoon is the truest interaction he’s had all day, which prompts him to repeat the message scribbled on his fridge, a message that had thus far rung hollow and reminded him of nothing.
In that moment, he remembers what it means. But he’s too busy with his phone, and the racoon with the stairs, to let it break the spell.
Illustration by Deepti Sunder, revision by Lilly Camp.
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