April M. Mildew

Age 21

2024: The first winter of the year. My chest is shaking. I think it's from fear but it might have just been that I was cold. Or it was both. I remembered that I will die. I don't want to die. I want to keep my memories. I don't want my memories to go away. I don't want to lose the people I love. I don't want it all to go away. They've just finished remodeling the bathroom. Now it is the death bathroom. Just like how my childhood blanket became a death blanket. I am trying to grasp onto something that will make me feel okay. I am singing half remembered lyrics to ABBA's The Winner Takes It All in the shower. This memory might actually be from 2023. I am not sure.

2023: It's late in the year. I am in a discord call with close friends. It is nice. I am streaming my first playthrough of Portal 2. I have been doing this for a few days now. Discord calls with friends. It has been nice. For a while the days had been too fast and this has been slowing it down. I pray this will last. It does not. Things fall apart, such is life.
also for a brief time during this year a friend invited me to a discord server run by the person running this survey. And I saw a bunch of other people who I remembered from years ago on other places on the internet. I realized I had remembered seeing links to that server being posted on tumblr years ago and I was too scared to click on them. The world is very small. It's actually very big, just parts of the internet are small. This does not really belong on this survey.

2022: Final weeks of the year. Getting invited to an internet artist's discord server because she liked my art and my "online presence". Just before that I was on her website trying to gather the confidence to click on an invite link to that same server. And then I get messaged out of the blue. It scared me very badly. I became paranoid that she was watching my computer somehow just like how I used to worry my dad was watching my cellphone somehow.

2021: Listening to The Resident's Demons Dance Alone while playing the space stage of Spore (2008) on a laptop held together with duct tape. I am alone in the world besides people who press the like button on posts I make on a tumblr blog. The world has shrunk to a single room. There are no months.

2020: Falling down the stairs at a ski lodge while listening to the 2015 recording of Times to Die by Car Seat Headrest on a Nintendo 3DS. It must have been in February. January?

2019: Happy Easter. You ruined it for us because you hate us. When they are done yelling I am lying in bed and drawing a picture of a cartoon deer. I think that this new idealized self will finally make me feel whole. I don't know if I've already stopped going to high school or if that's yet to fully fall apart.

2018: It is autumn. I am on the back porch. I am sending my friends a picture I drew of my fursona. She is a girl now. I will go inside and try to fall asleep on an air mattress next to my dad. He does not want the TV to be turned off. It is loud. I have school in the morning. I have formed an association in my head between this new place I have moved to and the album Congratulations by MGMT.

2017: It is Winter. I am on the balcony. Earlier that month I stared up at the moon and sent a message to my friend group's chat on telegram about how cool and big the moon was and a friend of my friend said "ok" and so I deleted all the messages I had sent. But now I am standing out here and listening to Sharpen Your Teeth by Ugly Casanova. I have attempted to sync the album up so that it would end at midnight. But this is the version with the bonus tracks included. It does not end on a cathartic note. It is no longer 2017. I yell happy new year and then immediately feel awkward. I go back inside.

2016: I am sitting in the green chair at my dad's place, owned by the great grandparents living in a nursing home, and I am talking to my first close friends on Kik. They were significantly older than me. While I wait for the next message I am drawing something on the free version of the app Artstudio on my iphone. It is a picture of my fursona. He is a grey wolf wearing a grey hoodie and standing in front of a peeling false happy backdrop with brick walls and smog poking out from behind it. It is very much an image drawn by a 12 year old. I tried to run away from home this year, that should probably be the more significant memory.

2015: I was in bed after watching skeptic atheist debunking videos with a smug look on my 12 year old face and then I for the first time I considered the idea that I would die and there would be "nothing" and that it would just end. I shook with fear. I had to get rid of the blanket I slept with because it was causing the thoughts.

2014: I can't really individually determine any memories from 2014 or 2013. I don't know what happened in the fourth or fifth grades. I can't place any events specifically into these years. I think I watched Youtube videos on a phone. I think a Game Theory video had a scary mario picture that made me have to run away from the phone. I think I was watching videos I thought were funny with a kid who was sleeping over at my dad's house. We were sharing a pair of earbuds. I don't remember who that kid was. Son of a friend of my dad.

2013: I think I was playing secret of mana on a big CRT in my bedroom at my dad's house.

2012: I am walking out of school and onto the playground. I am talking about Romney and Obama with a kid next to me. He says his dad is voting for Romney. I tell him Romney is bad because he hates gay people. I learned this from the internet. He didn't know what that meant. I don't remember if I explained. Wait a minute what the fuck. Was I really talking about this as a 9 year old? In the third grade? But what other year would I have been talking about Mitt Romney with another child. How old even is a 9 year old?? What are 9 year olds like??? What is the third grade???

2011: I think I got a Playstation 3 for Christmas. It came with LittleBigPlanet 2. My life is boring. Why am I thinking about worms. What does this memory have to do with worms. There is some connection here with worms.

2010: If I was seven, this must be the year of my mother's first seizure. It was in the basement bathroom. My sister and I were there. We were brushing our teeth and then she was on the floor. I think we called 911.

2009: I am in the sun room of my grandmother's house. It is a 70s/80s kind of house and it is on hilly terrain. Michael Jackson was on the television. I thought he was a woman because he had long hair. I believe it was the ending of the music video for "Leave Me Alone".

2008: Obama is the first president of my memory. I saw him on the television at the gas station. I am realizing now I have, deep in my heart, some sort of positive nostalgic attachment to gas stations and the companies who own them, some of the most demonic entities in this world, due to their presence in my childhood.

2007: I cannot attach a memory to this year. Possibly the year I was standing in a snowy parking clearing. Is that memory firsthand or a memory of watching it on videocassette?

2006: My ancient memory of being dressed up as a dragon for Halloween must be from this year. Is that a memory or a photo I saw? Maybe this is also the year where I sat in an inflatable chair, black with a flame pattern, at my new dad's house.

2005: I cannot attach a memory to this year.

2004: I cannot attach a memory to this year.

2003: I am told I was born here. I do not remember this.

2002: Not yet alive.

2001: Not yet alive.

2000: Not yet alive.

1999: Not yet alive. I like this year number.

1998: Not yet alive.

1997: Not yet alive.

Additional comments: memory