I was walking to the subway station, to get on in Brooklyn and meet friends in Manhattan. My mom was dying far away. She had been sick for many years, but pressed on and lived a good life. A few days earlier, I had gotten a call from my dad that I knew was bad. Her health had taken a turn, and I should prepare to fly back home soon. I had to wrap up part of my life in New York to prepare, which took a few days.
During this time, I felt simultaneously like I was walking through a daze and as if I were viewing the world with the veil pulled away. I moved very slowly, and most day-to-day things didn't register with me, but I felt that I could make eye contact unhesitatingly with anyone, looking deeply as if their eyes may hold some sort of response. I noticed things I didn't normally notice and the world made a different sort of sense. It was evening as I walked to the train. The setting sun lit up the sky--beyond the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower, the sky was a gorgeous watercolor spread of purples, pinks, and blues. I wanted to stop everything and watch it as long as I could. I didn't normally notice the sky, I guess. It must do just about this same thing every evening. I felt I should enjoy it, and I had missed it so many days before. I wished that by looking at something beautiful I could rise above my physical body, walking in the stream of people to the subway, and pause the progression of the world--stop aging, stop cancer eating away at flesh. I knew that by the time I got off the subway, the sun would have disappeared, the sky would be dark, and the moment would have passed.
After my mom passed away, I returned to New York. The haze continued, but the magical feeling of being able to reach beneath the surface of everyday events and see something meaningful had gone. It was winter now, and bitterly cold in the city. I spent my days wandering around, ostensibly looking for a job. I had a backpack full of resumes that I randomly distributed to shops, hotels, and restaurants that I passed.
There must have been something repellent about me, because finding a job was nearly impossible--no one was looking to hire. Or no one was looking to hire me in particular. My memories started to wind in on themselves, and I would periodically forget that my mom was dead. I would wander past places we'd been when she had visited New York. I'd get a idea in my head and have to act on it. Illogically, I would walk from West 90th Street to East 23rd to look into the window of a restaurant that we'd eaten in. I'd stand outside the window and try to see the table we'd sat at. I was disappointed often--either the restaurant had closed or the tables were rearranged in such a way that the table I wanted to see no longer existed where I wanted to see it.
I fixated on a journal that I'd left in Central Park, years before. I could clearly remember the bench I think I'd left it on. For several days in a row, I made my way to Central Park, thinking that if I could just find that journal... I could picture it clearly, sitting on the park bench. In fact, I must have had no such recollection. In fact, I'd simply walked away without looking back at it, which is of course how I'd forgotten it in the first place. The image in my head was false, just an image my brain had created to complete the story I'd created in my mind, which until then I had entitled "The Journal I Left in Central Park." I was good at leaving journals. I'd left one on a train from Moscow to Saint Petersburg, in the fold-up shelf on the upper berth of a sleeping car. I told myself afterward that it might be interesting reading for someone later. Not too likely, so I re-thought that it might be interesting practical reading for a student of English.
The story of the Central Park journal changed during this time. It became "The Journal That Will Change Everything Once I Find It." It was never clear in my head why it was important to find it, but like recapturing the scenes in a restaurant where we'd eaten, I felt that by seeing it again, I could bring something back. I was afraid that maybe I misremembered where the table had been in the restaurants, when I looked at them. If I misremembered that, what else was I misremembering? What else was I forgetting? The journal became a talisman. My primary source--it would help remind me of all the things I was afraid I hadn't remembered. It would bring back the part of my that existed when my mom was alive. From time to time, while wandering through Central Park (where, by the way, nearly every bench looks the same), I would think that this was crazy. A lost journal doesn't sit on a park bench untouched for two years, through two sets of each season. But most of the time I focused on the task at hand: looking intently for a journal that I knew no longer existed.
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