Anonymous 3

b. 1991

2024: I was sitting outside the chicken house on the bench by the kiwifruit tree, in the last part of winter or the very first part of spring, crying in a way which felt like my tears were coming out of my eyes like hot water from a hose turned on low. it was in the afternoon in the rest period after lunch but it was very overcast so it felt dark. i kind of wanted someone to come by and see i was crying so much and talk to me about it, but no-one did. i stopped crying after a while but stayed on the bench and shortly afterwards Clément came past and we talked about something normal. either he couldn't tell i'd been crying or he chose to not mention it. the fact that i cried so much and so earnestly (about not wanting to leave the place i was, and wanting to always live there but feeling that to be impossible), made me feel a warm glow of certainty about the direction of my future life.

2023: Throwing up in a dead-end alley between two businesses next to the yard that contained the bins and dumpsters belonging to the restaurant I was working in, mid-way through an evening shift, at Christmas time, because it was so busy and stressful during the shift, and I'd eaten a really big and very dry sandwich really fast on my break and it had got kind of lodged in my chest, so the cause of being sick was both the sandwich and also the stress, and my sick landing on the scrappy weeds that were still growing in that sheltered place even though it was December, and having to go back into work and work the rest of the shift with the acid flavour of sick in my mouth and my throat hurting.

2022: Lying in bed at like 1am in my attic room while someone played music from their car so loudly that I thought that it must be that, because the city I lived in was inbetween all these hills so each neighbourhood was like a valley, at least the whole neighbourhood if not more of the city was being kept awake. It kept going on and I got more and more furious and depressed at the thought of the person who was playing this music. The music was something with the kind of bass that makes my scalp crawl, almost like a phobic response to the particular frequency. There was nothing I could do to drown it out.

2021: Lying down in the polytunnel amongst the radish flowers so depressed that I couldn't even stand up any more.

2020: Waking up at 5am to phone B. who at the time was in a city on the west coast of America where it was 9pm. Our conversation springing straight out from the non-differentiation of my sleep made it easy to get to the purity of reflexivity that he and I were always trying to reach in our conversations at that time. Feeling the fractal purity of talking about the act of talking, of trying to be as present to the reality of the moment without interjecting "topics" to talk "about", which when our conversations were at their best was the whole point of them, to be the only real way of trying to connect two subjectivities, feeling like this was the closest I'd ever come to genuinely sharing an experience with someone in a shared subjectivity, instead of being trapped as two subjectivities irrevocably in object positions vis a vis each other, and that feeling being love.

2019: Watching a photobooth video recording of myself recounting a story of a pigeon I'd seen on the day that I made the video on, the story being my sense or feeling of the pigeon's subjective experience of her life while I sat on a bench and watched her. In the video as I told the story I started crying. In the memory I am watching that video impassively.

2018: Lying down on a banquette in the strange public area of my university that was completely encased in a plastic membrane, making it unbearably hot and stuffy, lying with my cheek against the rough grey fabric of the banquette, smelling its smell, looking across at the other banquette opposite, feeling unbearably hot and stuffy and sleepy, just woken up from a nap, and listening to "Ravens" from "A Crow Looked at Me" while seagulls walked around on the plastic membrane above me.

2017: I didn't initially recall anything from this year. Then I looked at my photos that reminded me it was the year my nephew was born, which reminded me of the memory of lying in bed awake at 3am convinced in my heart that both my sister and the baby had died during childbirth.

2016: I don't particularly recall anything from this year apart from the banality of political news upsetting me.

2015: Walking on the hill with my mother, it was warm and windy, I was the most suicidal I'd ever been, waiting for sertraline to start working, and I had to tell her how scared I was that I was going to die, and had to ask her to help me, even though the knowledge that I was making her have knowledge that her child was suicidal was an even worse feeling than being acutely suicidal

2014: I don't know if this was in 2014 or 2015 but standing in the front room of the house I'd been renting with my girlfriend, the moment after she shut the front door and got in a taxi and got driven away to the airport to go back home to Norway, and knowing that she was now my ex-girlfriend and I might not see her again, and experiencing a heartbreak and anguish so painful that it was actually numb, like when people describe getting a burn so severe that it feels cold. The living room had a lot of pine yellow hues. I stood with my back to the wall looking outwards and the front door was to my left and open doorway to the kitchen was to my right. All her stuff was gone and all my stuff was packed up in boxes. The vacuum left by her and her stuff made me feel like the entire world was imploding, which is a cliche of course but that's the only way I can describe the way it felt. Then my dad came in a hire van and did all the moving of my stuff and all the cleaning of the house while I moved around in a numbed daze, and then he drove me back to his house in double quick speed.

2013: Having sex on a rocky kind of beach area on the shores of a fjord in Norway in late summer. It was pretty cold and overcast and my girlfriend sat behind me and put her hands up my shirt and down my underwear while I looked out at the unbelievable vista of the Norwegian fjord.

2012: Cycling along the riverbank with Owen and Alice til we found a place to swim, in the incredible heatwave, finding a place to swim in the river, and the way the light looked as it got lower and bounced off the river in a kind of oily way, right by my eyes at water level.

2011: A sort of synthesis of lots of memories that can't be separated out and feel like one memory, of being a student, getting severely drunk with a specific group of people, several specific pubs and bars, several streets in the city at night, the university campus at dawn, the university campus with its lake frozen and a shopping trolley pushed out into the middle, being in the tiny single bed in my girlfriend's room under her super cheap super light synthetic duvet and green bobbly sheets, the smell of the perfume Blue and head and shoulders apple 2-1 shampoo, listening to the clash, watching the twilight zone, the corridor and the shower room and how it all smelt, the willow tree outside my window.

2010: Sitting on the grass in my parents' back garden with a feeling of total dread and despair because I didn't know what to do with the time in front of me, just in that one day, it was summer and the sun felt hostile, I had no idea what to do, no creative urge, nothing, I felt worthless and so shocked by my lack of volition. I wanted so badly to do something but had absolutely no idea at all what it could possibly be. Then I wrote about it in my diary.

2009: Eating an entire carton of cream of mushroom soup and sharting volcanically onto my computer chair.

2008: The time the girl I had a crush on decided to sit next to me in US Politics class and she stretched her arms and I saw her bellybutton piercing. I think the only time just looking at someone's body ever actively made me feel s**** a******

2007: London terrorist attack bombings meaning I couldn't get the underground home from school. I see the school buildings and everyone running around with rumour flying and the kids all working themselves up into being afraid.

2006: I was 15 in 2006. I have a memory of being in my schoolroom and looking at the people I hung out with who I named "my friends" and feeling how profoundly I didn't care about them. The tables were arranged in a square horseshoe. The carpet was blue and so was the upholstery of the chairs. I can remember a great number of the other people in my class who were in the room at the time, the spatial arrangements of the windows, door, whiteboard, teacher's desk, fire escape, and recall the colour of the trees outside (summer green). I remember feeling my life was stalled in that moment and I was somehow trapped for all eternity in that place with those people.

2005: I was 14 in 2005. I think this was the year I injured, perhaps broke my coccyx, from hitting it on a tap in the bath, which I think is the worst physical pain I can remember. It was perhaps my first experience of pain in a way that was more like an adult experiences it (with attendant anxiety about not being able to complete future tasks, instead of existing in the moment of the pain).

2004: I was 13 in 2004. I think this was the year that I first had an o*****. It was in the morning, I was under my duvet with sunlight filtering through it. I think I was thinking about a particular p*********** drawing I had seen on the internet. I can remember exactly what the image was and sort of re-experience the way it made me feel, if I try, and the memory is more precisely of re-conjuring the image in my head repeatedly to get the effect of it, and the weird repetitive process of doing that, than the physical feeling itself.

2003: I was 12 in 2003. I think this was the year in which I remember wanting to play an imaginary game with my twin sister with our toys but she didn't want to anymore, she had grown out of it, and my shame and confusion. There was a big blue and green IKea blanket on the floor of her room. I think I tried to play half-heartedly on it by myself, with hard plastic horse toys.

2002: Being on holiday in France and listening to the album "Blink 182" on the CD walkman over and over again. I had to share the walkman with my sister and we only had the one CD. The songs made me feel intense emotions as I sat by the side of the pool. Every emotional response I've had to music in the intervening years kind of pales into nothing compared to the searing extremity that I remember feeling.

2001: The only association I have with 2001 is the 9/11 attacks. I did watch some of the footage on TV, and that memory is cleaved to a memory of walking home from school down the big hill in the september heat.

2000: I was 8 and 9 in this year so I don't know if the memories I have pertain to the year exactly. Around this time we used to go out to eat at a particular pizza restaurant. My mother and I would order a salad and garlic bread to share and then I'd get a lasagne. The lasagne was served with parmesan and came in an oven hot dish. The beautiful waitress would warn me that the dish was hot and I would feel confused about the fact they were women and I found them beautiful but I was a child. The garlic bread came with a sprig of parsley which I would eat. The restaurant had marble tables of a particular quality that I sometimes encounter elsewhere in time. The lasagne was so delicious, I remember the texture of the pasta sheets and the way the sauce bubbled and burnt on the sides of the dish. I remember the red pepper grinders and a Picasso dove drawing on the wall. We would go on a coolish summer evening, I was so excited by the glamour of being out at a restaurant in the evening.

1999: I was 7 and 8 in this year so I don't know if the memories I have pertain to the year exactly. Perhaps it was the year in which I became so overwrought about my feelings towards my self and life that I felt I didn't deserve a bed, and took myself to sleep on the floor. We had a thick dirty white carpet and I felt so dreadful.

1998: I was 6 and 7 in this year so I don't know if the memories I have pertain to the year exactly. I think the memory I have of looking out of the window of our attic conversion room and seeing sparrow families flying inbetween the bushes in ours and the neighbours' backgardens might be from this year.

1997: Princess Diana's death, the news reports interrupted the cartoon I wanted to watch (Inspector Gadget)

Additional comments: Thanks!